Inventing the axial age: the origins and uses of a historical concept
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Inventing the axial age: the origins and uses of a historical concept John D. Boy & John Torpey
Published online: 24 March 2013 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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. Keywords History of social thought . Civilizations . Axial Age . Axiality . Religion . Historical sociology . Cultural sociology Until recently, it was widely said that we live in a time that has exhausted all “grand narratives.” Yet recently some of the biggest names in contemporary scholarship have taken up studies of the very longue durée, and of world history as a whole, in efforts to grasp central aspects of human experience. For example, the sociologist Robert Bellah, the anthropologist David Graeber, the ancient historian Ian Morris, and the psychologist Stephen Pinker have published massive studies going back millennia in time to make sense of our proclivity for religion, the origin of basic categories of economic life, relations of world domination and subordination, and our (putatively declining) propensity toward violence, respectively. In the process, these scholars J. D. Boy (*) : J. Torpey Doctoral Program in Sociology, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016, USA e-mail: [email protected] J. Torpey e-mail: [email protected]
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Theor Soc (2013) 42:241–259
seem to be contradicting both the postmodernist claim about the decline of grand narratives and the Weberian stricture that modern scholarly contributions must be the work of specialists. The recent outpouring of books in the genre of “big history” reinforces the impression that the end of the grand narrative has itself come to an end. This trend may be, among other things, a response to the incessant talk of “globalization,” an attempt to give depth to that rather vague notion even as it highlights its historical shallowness. One key feature of the current turn toward “big” or “world” or “universal” history has been the discussion of what the German philosopher Karl Jaspers dubbed, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the “axial age.” Indeed, from his European vantage point Bjørn Thomassen claimed very recently (2010, p. 327) that “t
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