Toynbee introduced ‘post-modern’ as an epochal category, not an aesthetic one.

Evidence

It was not until some twenty years later that the term emerged in the Anglophone world, in a very different 5 context — as an epochal rather than aesthetic category. In the first volume of his Study of History, also published in 1934, Arnold Toynbee argued that the concurrence of two powerful forces, Industrialism and Nationalism, had shaped the recent history of the West. Since the last quarter of the nineteenth century, however, they had entered into destructive contradiction with each other, as the international scale of industry burst the bounds of nationality, yet the contagion of nationalism itself spread downwards into ever smaller and less viable ethnic communities. The Great War had sprung from the conflict between these trends, making it unmistakeably clear that an age had opened in which national power could no longer be self-sufficient. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 12

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the key early distinction: Toynbee’s ‘post-modern’ is an epochal/historical category, in contrast to De Onis’s aesthetic one — a distinction that matters throughout the Jameson debate.
• XREF: connects to: Toynbee dated the postmodern age from industrialism breaking the bounds of nationality. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 12; Postmodernism may be the same epoch as modernism, not a radical break.; Postmodernism is a tendency within late modernism, not its successor — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 236 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Postmodernism may be the same epoch as modernism, not a radical break. #expands (0.80)
• Postmodernism is a tendency within late modernism, not its successor #expands (0.80) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 236
• Postmodernism precedes and enables modernism rather than following it. #expands (0.80) — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 502
• Postmodernism is a reflex of capitalism’s modification, not a new social order. #expands (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 13