What is axial about the axial age?

• Published in: Archives européennes de sociologie. European journal of sociology. 2005-01, Vol.XLVI (1), p.69-90
• Main Author: Bellah, Robert N
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Causality; Cultural change; Modernity; Social change; Sociological theory; Sociology of culture; Theory of culture
• ISSN: 0003-9756

The idea of an Axial Age in the mid-First Millennium B.C. has a long history but was crystallized by Karl Jaspers in his 1949 book The Meaning and Goal of History. Since then, Voegelin, Eisenstadt and many others have contributed to clarifying the four cases of axial "breakthrough", to use Jaspers's term, namely ancient Israel, Greece, India, and China. A number of significant background conditions - economic, social, and political - have been identified that indicate dramatic social change all across the old world, but there is no clear indication of the causal relation of these changes to the emergence of strikingly new cultural-religious formations. This article uses categories derived from the work of Merlin Donald to argue that in all four cases "theoretic" culture was applied to the reformulation of basic cultural premises, though "mimetic" and "narrative" traditions that had been central in older civilizations continued to be significant, but reformulated in the light of the new theoretic understandings. The four cases, however, are far from homogeneous. They show such differences between them that we can speak of "multiple axialities", as we have come to speak of "multiple modernities". Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press. An electronic version of this article can be accessed via the internet at http://journals.cambridge.org