Abstract
The concept of the axial age, initially proposed by the philosopher Karl Jaspers to refer to a period in the first millennium BCE that saw the rise of major religious and philosophical figures and ideas throughout Eurasia, has gained an established position in a number of fields, including historical sociology, cultural sociology, and the sociology of religion. We explore whether the notion of an “axial age” has historical and intellectual cogency, or whether the authors who use the label of a more free-floating “axiality” to connote varied “breakthroughs” in human experience may have a more compelling case. Throughout, we draw attention to ways in which uses of the axial age concept in contemporary social science vary in these and other respects. In the conclusion, we reflect on the value of the concept and its current uses and their utility in making sense of human experience.
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Notes
For this reason, Puiggrós (1966, p. 67) takes Jaspers to task for advancing “a theistic interpretation of the origin of philosophy.” For a general theory of intellectual change that stresses the networks of descent and of opposition as the chief sources of intellectual innovation, see Collins (1998).
For a critical discussion of the origins of this notion, see Masuzawa (2005).
The inaugural meeting of the Rencontres today is infamous for the spat between Lukács and Jaspers, often stylized as a debate between existentialism and Marxism. “It was not only an intellectual duel but also a struggle of ideologies for the minds of intellectuals” (Zoltai 1985, p. 72). A few years later, Lukács obliterated Jaspers in The Destruction of Reason (Lukács 1981).
The Spanish translation was published in 1950 by a journal founded by José Ortega y Gassett. While it is not clear whether Ortega y Gassett himself initiated the translation and publication of Jaspers’s work in Spain, it is likely that he took a personal interest in the work, as he wrote on Toynbee and universal history in 1948. The Spanish translation was the first to have a wide impact across the Atlantic, where several Argentinian philosophers and historians made use of the concepts tiempo-axial or tiempo-eje during the 1950s and 1960s. In 1953, the English translation was published simultaneously by Routledge & Paul in Britain and by Yale University Press in the United States (Jaspers 1953). While Yale University Press reissued the book in 1959 and 1965, and Greenwood Press reprinted that edition in 1976, it is notable that the book was out of print until Routledge reprinted it in its “Revivals” series in 2010. Soon after the English edition appeared, the prestigious publisher Plon published a French translation. In 1955–56, the Frankfurt-based publisher Fischer reissued the book in a mass-market paperback edition of 75,000 copies. Translations into Italian and Japanese followed in the 1960s, and more recently, the book has been translated into Chinese, Russian and Polish. Spanish translation: Origen y meta de la historia (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1950); French translation: Origine et sens de l’histoire (tr. H. Naef and W. Achterberg; Paris: Plon, 1954); Italian translation: Origine e senso della storia (tr. A. Guadagnin; Milano: Ed. di Comunità, 1965); Japanese translation: Rekishi no kigen to mokuhyô (tr. Shigeta Hideyo and Kusanagi Masao; Tôkyô: Kawade Shobô, 1969); Chinese translation: Li shi de qi yuan yu mu biao (tr. Wei Chuxiong and Yu Xintian; Beijing: Hua xia chu ban she, 198); Russian translation: Smysl i naznačenie istorii (tr. M. I. Levinoj and P. P. Gajdenko; Moskow: Izdat. Respublika, 1994); Polish translation: O źródle i celu historii (tr. J. Marzecki; Kęty, Poland: Marek Derewiecki, 2006).
In the work of Eisenstadt and Bellah, Japan is clearly regarded as a nonaxial civilization, i.e., not as part of the Confucian sphere (see, for example, Eisenstadt 2003, p. 484).
In a new edition of his Political Systems of Empires (originally published in 1963), Eisenstadt wrote that his analysis “went in many ways beyond what had then been the prevalent thrusts of structural-functionalism” (Eisenstadt 1993, p. xvii).
In the foreword to Seligman’s volume, Eisenstadt mentions that a volume called The Historical Dynamics of Axial Age Civilizations was forthcoming in 1989 from Oxford University Press, which would have made the output of the second conference available in English as well. For reasons unknown to us, this never happened.
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We want to thank Bjørn Thomassen and Theory and Society Editor Martin Jay, as well as participants of the New York Area Seminar in Intellectual and Cultural History for comments on a previous draft of this article.
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Boy, J.D., Torpey, J. Inventing the axial age: the origins and uses of a historical concept. Theor Soc 42, 241–259 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-013-9193-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-013-9193-0