Abstract
The axial age debate has put big questions of social and cultural change back on the agenda of sociology. This paper takes this development as an occasion to reflect on how social thought works with (and against) nineteenth-century intellectual traditions in its efforts to understand history on a macro scale. Karl Jaspers, who initially formulated the axial age thesis in The Origin and Goal of History, revised the Hegelian account of world history by broadening the scope of the narrative to encompass all civilizations participating in the events of the first millennium BCE that saw the rise of major philosophical and religious traditions. However, his account, like the earlier philosophical accounts he seeks to improve upon, privileges cognitive developments over material practices and social interactions, and as such offers little to those seeking to make sense of how cultural patterns interact with others and spread. Here another social theorist engaging with Hegel, W. E. B. Du Bois, provides a helpful contrast. His account of the development of double-consciousness in “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” the opening chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, helps us to understand experiences of encounter and the perduring historical effects they may have. Du Bois’ relational theory reminds us of the importance of unpacking abstractions and understanding processes in terms of social interactions.
Highlights
The axial age debate has put big questions of social and cultural change back on the agenda of sociology
This paper is a reflection on the history of social thought and on how it has worked with and against the nineteenth-century tradition of thinking about big questions, the Hegelian account of world history
As is well known before it initially entered the vocabulary of sociology in the 1960s, the notion of the axial age was initially formulated by the philosopher Karl Jaspers
Summary
Prior to his internal emigration during the years of Nazi rule, Karl Jaspers was a professor of psychiatry and philosophy at the university in Heidelberg, Germany’s oldest (for further biographical detail, see Kirkbright 2004). While at the time Elias’s point of reference was Thomas Mann’s Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, he did not have to look to the northern German novelist for an example of an intellectual who insisted on the distinction between culture and civilization His elder colleagues in Heidelberg, including Alfred Weber and Jaspers, insisted upon this division, for instance in their debate on relativism with Karl Mannheim, whose Ideology and Utopia, a foundational text in the sociology of knowledge, suggested a Brelativization of spirit^ that Jaspers found intolerable. Jaspers’s affirmation of unity in the diversity of cultural development hinges on the notion of the axial age This period, which is common to the Eurasian civilizations, laid the spiritual basis for the major philosophical and religious traditions, giving rise to humans Bas we know [them] today.^ As such it is the source of a historical trajectory shared by the civilizations of Eurasia.
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