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The “Axial Period”: What Was It and What Does It Signify?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2008

Antony Black
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Abstract

Karl Jaspers coined the term the “axial period” to refer to what he saw as the simultaneous development in several different and separate societies—China, India, Iran, Israel, Greece—of “a new departure within mankind.” What he meant has been characterized as “a kind of critical, reflective questioning of the actual and a new vision of what lies beyond.” While it is true that people in each of these separate cultures began to develop new ways of talking about the cosmos, ethics, and community, Jaspers's approach and description of these phenomena were, I shall argue, highly defective. This has led to serious misunderstandings of what was involved.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 70 , Issue 1: Special Issue on Comparative Political Theory , Winter 2008 , pp. 23 - 39
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2008

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References

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7 The argument for this article came out of work I am doing for “A World History of Ancient Political Thought,” to be published by Oxford University Press in about two years.

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18 Eisenstadt, “The Axial Age,” is hardly adequate on this (303).

19 See The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought, part 1.

20 It is clear from the Apology that Socrates was conscious of “the divine”—an inner voice—in his own life.

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27 Eisenstadt, “The Axial Age,” 294, 298.

28 See Eisenstadt, “The Axial Age,” 299ff.

29 See Jaspers, “The Axial Period,” 5.

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31 Confucius, the Buddha, Socrates, Zoroaster and (later) Jesus all relied on oral communication, but their ideas were disseminated in written form as well as by word of mouth.

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33 Between China, India, and the West, “profound mutual comprehension was possible from the moment they met,” as Jaspers put it (“The Axial Period,” 8).

34 On a loss of identity in Syria and Egypt in late antiquity, see Crone, Patricia and Cook, Michael, Hagarism: the Making of the Islamic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 47–72Google Scholar.