Toynbee studied history centering his work on the life and death of civilizations.

As Wikipedia says:

> 
> Toynbee argued that "Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder."
>  For Toynbee, civilizations were not intangible or unalterable machines
>  but a network of social relationships within the border and therefore
>  subject to both wise and unwise decisions they made.
> 
> 
> 

Toynbee said:

> 
> Of the twenty or so civilizations known to modern Western historians,
>  all except our own appear to be dead or moribund, and, when we
>  diagnose each case, in extremis or post mortem, we invariably find
>  that the cause of death has been either War or Class or some
>  combination of the two. To date, these two plagues have been deadly
>  enough, in partnership, to kill off nineteen out of twenty
>  representatives of this recently evolved species of human society;
>  but, up to now, the deadliness of these scourges has had a saving
>  limit.
> 
> 
> 

A lot of changed since he passed away, and when he was alive was at the time of Cold War, and he didn't see the fall of Soviet Empire and we don't know how would have interpreted the times that followed.

So is there a student of Toynbee that discuses his legacy and what would be his conclusions about the current state and fate of Western Civilization on which of Toynbee stages is? Are we in the *Universal State* stage? Have we entered the *Breakdown/Disintegration* phase?