The Axial Age and its Consequences for Subsequent History and the Present

Conference, July 3-5, 2008

Thüringer Staatskanzlei, Erfurt

On 3-5 July 2008 a conference was held at the Thüringer Staatskanzlei in the city of
Erfurt, organized by the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies of
the University of Erfurt and funded by the Templeton Foundation (USA), on the theme of
“The Axial Age and its Consequences for Subsequent History and the Present”. The
conference was held in honour of the American sociologist Robert N. Bellah of the
University of California, Berkeley, who was awarded an honorary doctorate on behalf of
the Max Weber Center. The event was chaired by the Dean of the Max Weber Center,
Prof. Dr. Hans Joas, and was attended by the following internationally renowned
speakers: Johann Arnason, Jan Assmann, Robert N. Bellah, José Casanova, Merlin
Donald, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Jürgen Habermas, Hans Joas, Matthias Jung, Richard
Madsen, Manos Marangudakis, David Martin, Gananath Obeyesekere, Heiner Roetz,
Walter Garrison Runciman, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, Charles Taylor, Steven
Tipton, and Björn Wittrock.
The conference was held to determine the historical meaning and contemporary
normative significance of the idea of a period of epoch-making transformation in ancient
history known as the “Axial Age”. According to a conception first adumbrated by the
German philosopher Karl Jaspers in 1949 in The Origin and Goal of History, this thesis
denotes a series of parallel developments instanced by the civilizations and religions of
ancient China, India, Persia, Israel and Greece between approximately the years of 800
and 200 in the first millennium BCE.
Ever since the publication of Jaspers’s book, the concept of a process of axial
transformation or axial orientation in this period has generally been understood to refer to
the advent of ideas of transcendence in ancient civilisations, where human communities
begin to break with particular kinds of customary beliefs and practices and construct
systematic ideas of higher powers or transcendent spheres that place existing earthly
institutions, authorities and customs in question. Alluding to a passage in Hegel’s
Lectures on the Philosophy of History which spoke of the appearance of Christ on earth
as the “axis” or “hinge” on which the history of the world turns, Jaspers sought to
overcome Hegel’s Christian-centred and Europe-centred vision of history in order to
define multiple parallel courses of axial historical development across multiple world
religions and civilizations. Over the past half-century, Jaspers’s thesis has been
developed in a number of directions by historians and historical sociologists, including
particularly by the Israeli scholar Shmuel N. Eisenstadt. But it is only in recent years that
interest in the thesis has attracted intensive attention from scholars from across the full
spectrum of the humanities and social sciences.
The conference in Erfurt aimed to resolve a number of outstanding questions
raised by the thesis of the Axial Age and by the idea of axial transformation in general.
What light does the conception throw on the evolution of religions? What features do so-
called “axial civilizations” share in common? How broadly should the scope of the thesis
be extended beyond elements originally named by Jaspers or by subsequent scholars such
as Eisenstadt, Eric Voegelin or Benjamin Schwartz? How does the concept of axiality

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relate to forms of moral and political universalization in modern times? What impact has
been left by the Axial Age on the emergence of modernity and on processes of
modernization in different world regions? Must analogous kinds of modern axial
transformation imply secularization or can religions continue to develop in axial ways in
the present day? How does axial consciousness relate to development in language,
symbolization, cognition and communication in general?
Broadly five main strands of discussion emerged in the course of the proceedings:
(1) an idea of the Axial Age as an overarching thesis about the structure of world history;
(2) a focus on practices of cognitive world renunciation in ancient civilizations and
religions; (3) a discussion of the significance of the thesis for debate about religion,
secularization and political identities in modern global times; (4) an exploration of ideas
of axiality in relation to theories of cognitive and linguistic evolution; and (5) an
examination of problems, criticisms and methodological difficulties with the thesis of the
Axial Age as a chronological framework.
(1) The conference was inaugurated by the sociologist and Dean of the Max
Weber Center, Hans Joas, who began by tracing some intellectual antecedents to
Jaspers’s conception in the work of Max Weber and notably in the thought of the
nineteenth century German scholar Ernst von Lasaulx – one of the first writers explicitly
to evoke an idea of multiple ideas of religious transcendence as an integral part of a
Christian understanding of “universal history”. He also interpreted the importance of the
Axial Age thesis in the whole of Jasper’s philosophy. The Canadian philosopher Charles
Taylor advanced a proposal for understanding the continuation of Axial ideas in medieval
Latin Christendom, where religious conceptions of transcendence come to exist side-by-
side with certain pre-Axial elements in a state of uneasy equilibrium – such as in the kind
of conditions described by Mikhail Bakhtin in terms of “carnival” – but where tension
between Axial and non-Axial moments is gradually eliminated in the course of processes
of Reformation. Shmuel Eisenstadt elaborated further aspects of the dynamic of
inclusivism and exclusivism in the formation and after-life of Axial visions, where
universalistic cognitive developments may pacify and assimilate conflicting social parties
but also sometimes exclude them, in some cases with destructive consequences.
(2) Robert Bellah explicated the significance of acts and ideas of renunciation
and reflective self-withdrawal from worldly affairs in ancient contexts such as Plato’s
Athens and the Buddha’s India as examples of axial criticism of conventional temporal
authorities. In this conception, the Axial Age witnessed forms of willed social and
political exile or homelessness or “a-topic” or u-topian contemplation that usher in
distinctive practices of theoretical cognition, or theoria, as the Greeks called it.
“Theoretic culture” in this sense represents a decisive evolutionary step beyond pre-
existing forms of mimetic and narrative consciousness embodied in myths and received
habits and customs. The Sri Lankan scholar Gananath Obeyesekere (Princeton
University) elaborated this thinking in the Buddha’s teaching of the Middle Way. The
Sinologist Heiner Roetz pointed to complementary examples in the case of Confucian
China.
(3) Jürgen Habermas addressed some implications of ideas of axiality for
challenges to secular self-understanding in modern times, outlining ways in which
religious historical legacies in the present day can continue to foster practices of
universalistic ethical self-understanding, though also drawing attention to some limits of

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this potentiality. The British sociologist David Martin argued for a way of thinking about
axiality in terms of a continually evolving, never fully realized capacity for cognitive
self-accusation on the part of historical associations of peoples, where claims to universal
validity can typically overshoot or betray their own reflective aspirations. The Spanish-
American sociologist José Casanova extended this theme to an account of both processes
of the secularization of religion on the one hand and processes of the “sacralization of the
secular” on the other hand. According to this conception, religions in the modern age do
not dwindle to a sphere of privacy but instead continue to inhabit the public sphere in
various ways, including notably in the form of legacies of sacrality inscribed in political
and juridical codes – a thesis drawing closely on writings by Émile Durkheim and Robert
Bellah on citizenship and “civil religion”. Along similar lines, Hans Joas presented a way
of reading Max Weber’s idea of “disenchantment” (Entzauberung) not in terms of the
disappearance of religion tout court but rather in terms of the decline specifically of
magical or supernaturalist forms of belief – although Joas also highlighted ways in which
even Weber’s thinking about magic tends to fail to capture the salience of certain kinds of
persistently sacramental religious experience in the modern age.
The four supporting co-authors of Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart, a best-
selling study of American political self-understanding in the 1980s – Richard Madsen,
William Sullivan, Steven Tipton and Ann Swidler – explored a range of applications of
ideas of axial change to sociological analyses of global patterns, dynamics, inequalities
and conflicts in the era of globalization, especially in the arenas of education, social
mobility and political participation.
(4) The Canadian cognitive scientist Merlin Donald outlined a scheme of stages
of cognitive evolution marked by the passage from mimetic and mythic-narrative forms
of human interaction with natural environments to forms of “theoretic culture”, as
represented by Axial belief and consciousness. The German philosophical scholar
Matthias Jung revisited this proposal in the context of developmental theories of
symbolic communication, drawing on resources from American pragmatist philosophy
and classical German humanistic thought. Two complementary accounts of ideas about
cognitive evolution came from the British sociological theorist Walter Garrison
Runciman and from the Greek scholar Manos Marangudakis, the former elaborating
models of selective adaptability drawn from research in the behavioural sciences, the
latter focusing on genetic technology and the prospect of its application to human
reproduction as a challenge for axial consciousness.
(5) An important set of criticisms and qualifications of the Axial Age thesis and
caveats about its overextension were put forward by the distinguished German
Egyptologist Jan Assmann. Assmann’s contribution cautioned particularly against rigidly
chronological interpretations of the thesis where too many different civilizational cases –
such as ancient Egypt, but also many other cases not originally encompassed in Jaspers’s
framework – come to be invidiously ignored or stretched onto a Procrustean bed of
schematic periodization. Assmann warned against overuse of evolutionary theorizing at
the expense of alternative concepts and approaches such as “collective memory”,
archaeological analysis and phenomenological explication, especially with respect to the
understanding of developments in writing and literacy in the ancient world. The Icelandic
sociologist Johann Arnason and the Swedish sociologist Björn Wittrock called for both

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flexibility and specificity in concepts of axiality in ancient as well as modern historical
contexts.
Among the many wide-ranging themes of discussion addressed in the conference,
some broad points of general agreement can be highlighted. A loose consensus can be
said to have emerged in this conference about the value and interest of an idea of the
Axial Age as something referenced more or less specifically to an epoch-making phase of
ancient history but not necessarily tightly restricted to the first millennium BCE. A
generally shared view emerged that concepts of transcendence and collective
fundamental self-reflection can be fruitfully deployed to make sense of far-reaching
cognitive structures and trajectories of global historical change or “universal history”.
These concepts can be used in tandem with other complementary motifs such as
“modernization”, “cognitive evolution”, “collective memory”, “globalization” and
“universalization”. The Axial Age can be thought to refer to a more or less definite step
in cognitive evolutionary processes, carried by the symbolic languages of religion,
metaphysics, art, science and political identity in different ancient civilizational contexts,
or it can also be understood to signify a more openly normative idea or a future ethical
ideal of some kind that has yet to be fully realised, in the sense of an “unfinished
project”. In both cases, whether as a predominantly historical conception or as a more
open-ended normative idea, the thesis of axiality indicates that historical, social and
political life in general is only adequately understood when it is related to guiding
structures of spiritual belief and worldview or to what Max Weber called the “ultimate
values” (Letztwerte) by means of which human communities find orientation in the
earthly world and confront their own feelings of vulnerability, finitude and fallibility in
the face of the cosmos.
Publication of the proceedings of the conference is planned in English and
German versions, but also in other language. For further inquiries, please contact the
Director of the Max Weber Center at the University of Erfurt:

Prof. Dr. Hans Joas

Max Weber Center
University of Erfurt
Am Huegel 1
D - 99084 Erfurt (Germany)

http://www.uni-erfurt.de/maxwe/

Email: bettina.hollstein@uni-erfurt.de
Tel. 0361 737 2800
Fax 0361 737 2809