What is axial about the axial age?

Archives Europeennes de Sociologie

Volumn 46, Issue 1, 2005, Pages

  Bellah, Robert N ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

SOCIAL THEORY;

EID: 23944456412     PISSN: 00039756     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0003975605000032     Document Type: Article

References (58)

1. Robert N. Bellah, "Religious Evolution", American Sociological Review, 29 (3), 1964, pp. 358-374. In that article I used the term "primitive" for what I now call "tribal", because of the possible pejorative implication of the word primitive. The present article is drawn from a chapter in a larger work in progress that probes more deeply the themes laid out in that article of over forty years ago.
2. Thorkild Jacobsen, "The Cosmos as a State", in Henri Frankfort, Mrs. Henri Frankfort, John A. Wilson and Thorkild Jacobsen, Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (Harmondsworth, UK, Pelican, 1949 [1946], pp. 137-199).
3. Marcel Gauchet in his The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1997 [1985], see especially Chapters 1 and 2, pp. 23-46) makes the point that the emergence of the state focusing on a divine or quasi-divine king, destabilizes the equilibrium of what he calls "primeval religion", which he describes as both egalitarian and immobile. Though his notion of pre-state religion as "the reign of the absolute past" is hardly adequate, failing as it does to catch the openness and diversity of such religions, his emphasis on the emergence of the archaic state as the essential precondition for the axial age is surely correct.
4. Christianity and Islam fall outside the axial age chronologically, but are historically intelligible only as developments of Israel's axial breakthrough.
5. Eric Voegelin, Israel and Revelation, Vol. 1 of Order and History (Baton Rouge, LA, Louisiana State University Press, 1956, p. 164).
6. Arnaldo Momigliano, Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization (Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 1975, pp. 8-9).
7. Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953 [1949], p. 1).
8. Jaspers, Op. cit., p. 4.
9. Jaspers, Op. cit., p. 6.
10. Susan and Andrew Sherratt (in "The Growth of the Mediterranean Economy in the Early First Millennium BC", World Archaeology, 24 (3), 1993, pp. 361-378) describe the remarkable economic growth of the first half of the first millennium in the Middle East and the Mediterranean: "In 1000 B.C. most of the Mediterranean was effectively prehistoric; by 500 B.C. it formed a series of well differentiated zones within a world-system". There was not only a significant growth of trade, but an increase in manufacturing, urbanization and literacy throughout the Mediterranean basin. The Sherratts attribute the driving force of this change to Phoenicia, under Assyrian pressure, especially from the tenth through the eighth centuries. Only from the seventh century do the Greeks begin to rival the Phoenicians in trade and colonization. Similar developments, though perhaps a few centuries later, have been observed in northern India and Northern China.
11. "Neo-Assyrian" to distinguish it from the Old Assyrian state (c. 1900-c. 1830 B.C.) and the Middle Assyrian state (c. 1400-c. 1050).
12. See Momigliano, Alien Wisdom (Ch. 6, "Iranians and Greeks," pp. 123-150), on the disappointing quality of the surviving Greek observations of the Persian Empire, as well as the severe limitations of all other forms of documentation.
13. Max Weber, Economy and Society, Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, eds. (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1978 [1921-22], pp. 441-442, 447).
14. Eric Voegelin, Order and History (Baton Rouge, LA, Louisiana State University Press, 1956-1987, 5 Vol.).
15. Eric Voegelin, The World of the Polis, Volume 2 of Order and History (Baton Rouge, LA, Louisiana State University Press, 1957, pp. 19-23).
16. In volume 4, The Ecumenic Age (Baton Rouge, LA, Louisiana State University Press, 1974, pp. 2-6), Voegelin abandons the idea that leaps in being can be located at any specific period in history, while admitting his earlier debt to Jaspers.
17. S. N. Eisenstadt, "Introduction: The Axial Age Breakthroughs - Their Characteristics and Origins", in S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., The Origins and Diversity of the Axial Age (Albany, New York, State University of New York Press, 1986, p. 1).
18. Eisenstadt recognizes the contribution of Jaspers, Voegelin, and also of the Daedalus conference on the axial age organized by Benjamin Schwartz and published as Wisdom, Revelation, and Doubt: Perspectives on the First Millennium B.C., Daedalus, 104, 2, Spring, 1975.
19. In particular, Eisenstadt noted Schwartz's emphasis on "the strain toward transcendence" in the axial age in his essay "The Age of Transcendence", in Daedalus, Spring 1975, pp. 1-7.
20. See also S. N. Eisenstadt, Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities, two volumes, Leiden: Brill, 2003, especially the essays in Vol. 1, Part II, "Axial Civilizations".
21. The most recent collection of work on the axial age in which Eisenstadt has been engaged is Johann P. Arnason, S. N. Eisenstadt and Björn Wittrock, eds, Axial Civilizations and World History, Leiden, Brill, 2005.
22. For doubts about China see Mark Elvin, "Was There a Transcendental Breakthrough in China?" in Eisenstadt, Origins, pp. 325-359. Similar arguments have been made with respect to Greece.
23. Johann Arnason, "The Axial Age and its Interpreters: Reopening a Debate", in Arnason, Eisenstadt and Wittrock, Axial Civilizations, pp. 31-32.
24. He refers to a passage in Jaspers, Origins, p. 2.
25. Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991, p. 214).
26. Donald, Op. cit., p. 269.
27. Donald, Op. cit., p. 272.
28. Donald, Op. cit., p. 312.
29. Donald, Op. cit., p. 273.
30. Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1986, p. xiii).
31. I discovered the source of the James quotation in "Brute and Human Intelligence", in William James, Writings 1878-1899 (New York, Library of America, 1992 [1878], p. 911).
32. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, La mentalité primitive (Paris, Librairie Felix Alcan, 1922);
33. Primitive Mentality (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1923). A careful reading of Lévy-Bruhl will disclose that he was not as ridiculous as he has been made out to be.
34. Donald, Op. cit., pp. 339-340.
35. Donald, Op. cit., p. 341.
36. Yehuda Elkana, "The Emergence of Second-Order Thinking in Classical Greece", in Eisenstadt, Op. cit., pp. 40-64. Eisenstadt frequently uses "second-order thinking" as a synonym for his term "reflexivity".
37. Momigliano, Op. cit., p. 9.
38. Elkana, art. cit., p. 64.
39. In The Ecumenic Age, Volume 4 of Order and History (Baton Rouge, LA, Louisiana State University Press, 1974), Voegelin speaks of "mytho-speculation", which becomes in Vol. 5, In Search of Order (Baton Rouge, LA, 1987), "mythospeculation" without the hyphen. What he means by the term, in his own phraseology, is as follows: "The dimension of reason in the symbolism [of mythospeculation] does not reflect the light of a fully differentiated noetic consciousness; as far as their relevance is concerned, the pragmatic materials are illuminated rather by a speculation that remains subordinate to the cosmological myth. Mythopoesis and noesis combine into a formative unit that holds an intermediate position between cosmological compactness and noetic differentiation. It will suitably be called mytho-speculation, i.e., a speculation within the medium of the myth" (The Ecumenic Age, p. 64).
40. See David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, Chapter 9, "Comparison of these Religions [polytheism and monotheism], with regard to Persecution and Toleration", where Hume compares polytheistic toleration with monotheistic "zeal and rancour, the most furious and implacable of all human passions", in Richard Wollheim, ed., Hume on Religion (New York, Meridian, 1964 [1757], p. 65).
41. Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 25).
42. See also Erik Horning, Akhenaten and the Religion of Light (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1999 [1995]).
43. "The Great Hymn to the Aten", Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Vol. 2, The New Kingdom, pp. 96-100.
44. James P. Allen, "The Natural Philosophy of Akhenaten", in W. K. Simpson, ed., Religion and Philosophy in Ancient Egypt (New Haven, Yale Egyptological Studies, 3, 1989, pp. 89-101).
45. See also Jan Assmann, Akhanyati's Theology of Light and Time (Jerusalem, The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Proceedings, 7 (4), 1992, pp. 143-175);
46. and The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs (New York, Holt, 2002 [1996], pp. 214-228).
47. Arnaldo Momigliano, "Religion in Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem in the First Century B.C.", in his On Pagans, Jews, and Christians (Middletown, Conn., Wesleyan University Press, 1987, pp. 76-77). We do not know how far back the handshake goes, but Momigliano reports its existence at the time of the Persians and the Celts, as well as the Greeks and Romans.
48. Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton University Press, 2004, pp. 53-54). He also argues, convincingly to me, that genuine learning requires the physical presence of teachers and students, so that "distance learning" is ersatz at best.
49. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Stuart E. Dreyfus, Mind over Machine: The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Age of the computer (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1986).
50. Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1990, p. 111).
51. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (London: Methuen, 1982, pp. 66-67). This is not the place to pursue the important issue of the relation between orality and literacy, but Walter Ong in several books beside the one cited has made important contributions, as have Eric Havelock and Jack Goody.
52. Eric Weil, "What is a Breakthrough in History?" Daedalus, Spring 1975, pp. 21-36.
53. Eric Weil, art. cit., p. 26.
54. Eisenstadt has recently emphasized "multiple axialities" along with "multiple modernities". See his "Axial Civilizations and the Axial Age Reconsidered", in Arnason, Eisenstadt, and Wittrock, Axial Civilizations, p. 561.
55. See Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (Oxford, Blackwell, 1995 [1987]). Philosophy was always an elite, seldom if ever a popular, movement.
56. In my current work in progress I am making an effort at such deep comparison.
57. Jaspers, Op. cit., p. 20.
58. E. Weil, art cit, p. 22.