Apocalypse Now: Arnold Toynbee, William Blake and our understanding times

The British historian, Arnold Toynbee, is currently out of fashion. The British poet and artist, William Blake, is not, though he is rarely well understood. So what might they have to say to our times?Toynbee strove to understand the inner as well as outer processes of history, developing a theory he called etherialisation. Blake appreciated the destructive power of the dark, Satanic mills, with their loss of divine imagination.Bring them together, and the two perspectives are remarkably illu...