Axial Age and Its Consequences (9780674070448) by Bellah Robert N.; Joas Hans

Author:Bellah, Robert N.; Joas, Hans [Hans Joas, Robert N. Bellah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Destructive Possibilities?

11

The Axial Conundrum between Transcendental Visions and Vicissitudes of Their Institutionalizations

Constructive and Destructive Possibilities

SHMUEL N. EISENSTADT

In this essay I shall examine the tensions and contradictions attendant on the institutionalization of Axial visions. These tensions are, first, the result of problems inherent in the institutionalization of Axial visions—for example, the implementation of economic and power structures. Second, these tensions are rooted in the internal structure of Axial visions—most notably in the tension between their inclusivist universalist claims and their exclusivist tendency, rendering their institutionalization potentially destructive. These problems point to the continual tension between constructive and destructive elements of social and cultural expansion and evolution.

The crystallization of Axial civilizations constitutes one of the most fascinating developments in the history of mankind, a revolutionary process that has shaped the course of history dramatically. It is not surprising that it constitutes a great challenge to sociological theory as well.

Robert Bellah, in his article “What Is Axial about the Axial Age?,” has presented a succinct analysis of the cultural specificity of the Axial breakthrough.1 The core of this breakthrough, so he argues, has been a change or transformation of basic cultural conceptions—a breakthrough to what he calls the theoretical stage of human thinking, or reflexivity. The distinctiveness of this breakthrough and its impact on world history, however, does not lie solely in the emergence of such conceptions but in the fact that they became the basic, predominant, and indeed hegemonic premises of the cultural programs and institutional formations within a society or civilization. Not all places that witnessed the emergence of such conceptions saw also their transformation into hegemonic cultural premises; even in places where such a transformation took place, it was usually very slow and intermittent—Islam being the only (partial) exception in this regard. It is therefore only when both processes come together that we can speak of an Axial civilization.

This Axial breakthrough occurred in many parts of the world: in ancient Israel, later in Second Commonwealth Judaism and in Christianity, in ancient Greece, (partially) in Zoroastrian Iran, in early imperial China, in Hinduism and Buddhism, and later in Islam. With the exception of Islam, these civilizations crystallized in the first millennium BCE and the first centuries of the Common Era. It was this relative synchronicity that gave rise to the concept of an “Axial Age”—first formulated by Karl Jaspers and imbued with strong, if only implicit, evolutionary notions.2 Jaspers saw the Axial Age as a distinct, basically universal and irreversible step in the development—or evolution—of human history. However, while the emergence and institutionalization of Axial civilizations heralded revolutionary breakthroughs that developed in parallel or in similar directions in different societies, the concrete constellations within these civilizations differed greatly.

The distinctive characteristics of each Axial civilization lie in the development of a specific combination of cultural orientations and institutional formations that triggered a specific societal dynamic.3 The core of the Axial “syndrome,” to paraphrase Johann Arnason, lies in the combination of two tendencies. The first tendency was the radical distinction between ultimate and

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