In his book "On the Origin and Goal of History", the German thinker Jasbeth believes that around 500 BC, there were breakthroughs in human culture in the East and the West, producing "paradigm creators" such as Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, and Zarathustra, thus laying the foundation of the human spirit and opening the later development direction of their respective civilizations, thus forming different religious-ethical views and cultural models, and he called this period the "Axial Age".
Building on Jasbeth's theory of the "Axial Age", John Tolpe, the author of this book, further argues that the "Axial Age" around 500 BC was only one of three key periods that directly affected contemporary social problems. He believes that there is not only one original "Axial Age" and its subsequent development, but that there are three "Axial Ages", each of which has a direct impact on the lives of mankind and the problems that mankind has to face.
Three axial epochs in human history
Moral, material, spiritual
By John Tolpe
Translated by Sun Yue
This book analyzes the development of human history from a sociological perspective, taking morality, materiality, and spirituality as the threefold structure of human history. The author further concretizes the "Axial Age" and guides readers to think about the current situation and future of human society with a global perspective.
In addition, the book is translated by Professor Sun Yue, who has translated a number of books on global history, and is accompanied by an interpretive preface by Yasbeth researcher Professor Li Xuetao, which is a must-read for readers interested in history and sociology.
Creatively put forward the idea that there are three axial eras in history up to now
Torpe points out that the objections to Jasbeth's concept of the Axial Age revolve primarily around the fact that, on the one hand, the relevant Axial Age is quite long, centuries old; On the other hand, this period is too short to cover major developments in moral and religious thought, such as Christianity and Islam. Based on this understanding, some scholars have tinkered with the concept of the Axial Age in many ways, such as proposing concepts such as "secondary breakthroughs" or arguing that there have been many "Axial Ages", each of which marks an important "breakthrough" in human affairs.
Tolpe, on the other hand, proposes a compromise position that argues that there have in fact been three truly important axial epochs in human history: first, the "canonical" moral axial epoch that emerged about 2,500 years ago; This was followed by the "material" Axial Age, which began around 1750; Again, it is happening in today's "spiritual" Axis Age. The developments associated with these three periods constitute the basic environment in which the species currently finds itself, and on which humanity must respond to the contemporary challenges it faces. The history is described from the perspective of three key periods, aiming to enable students and interested readers to recognize and understand the history of mankind since the birth of the city.
The "Axial Age" is further concretized, and readers are guided to think about the current situation and future of human society from a global perspective
According to Torpe, each of the three axial eras has its own characteristic preoccupation and attitude toward material goods. For example, the first Axial Age is associated with the idea of transcendence, that is, the use of the present as a measure of this world, and thus the discovery of the scarcity of this world. Thus, the era's efforts to advance moral thinking and asceticism are closely linked to several of the "world religions" that Max Weber had worked on and the rise of classical Greek philosophy.
In addition, each of the three axial eras relies on a different energy regime. The first Axial Age relied on human and animal power, and this was the case throughout human history until the advent of the steam engine at the end of the eighteenth century. James Watt's innovations have ushered humanity into the second Axial Age, which has since relied on energy from fossil fuels, which has enabled humanity to take the initiative to transform the entire biosphere as never before. The third Axial Age – if the human species is to survive – will have to rely on renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, hydro and other non-fossil fuels that do not emit greenhouse gases like fossil fuels.
Finally, each of the three axial eras has its own unique mode of thought. The unique carriers of thought in the age of the moral axis were intellectuals and clerics, who, in the words of Robert Bella, invented the "thinking about thinking" way of thinking. That is to say, humanity at this time experienced great progress in self-reflection, in part because the surplus product of the time was sufficient to feed a group of people who were devoted to thinking and did not need to be directly engaged in material production. The second Axial Age of Matter is characterized by "thinking about producing", and its pioneering thinkers Adam Smith and Karl Marx both focused their theories on the production and distribution of wealth in human society. The third Spiritual Axis is different from the first two in that it is "thinking that produces thinking." The most prominent manifestation of this is the so-called artificial intelligence and "intelligent machines", in short, the spiritual axis era is that everything must be "intelligent", such as smartphones, driverless cars, smart homes, precision-guided weapons, and so on. This era promises to deliver smart technology – a more effective technology – to save humanity from crisis due to man-made climate change. On the other hand, the Spiritual Axis Age has led to the unemployment of a large number of traditional wage earners, raising big questions that need to be solved or considered urgently, such as the relationship between work and income, and the true value of new technologies to human beings.
In the book, Torpe explores each of these three axial eras in detail, helping us better understand how the world works today. At the same time, he also pointed out that the three axial ages have made great contributions to the well-being of mankind, and although there are still a series of problems that plague humanity today, some aspects have improved significantly compared to the past.
About the Author
John Tolpe
John Torpey
He is currently a professor of sociology and history at the City University of New York and director of the Ralph Bunch Institute for International Studies, with research interests in social and critical theory, comparative historical sociology, sociology of religion, and political sociology. He is the author of The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State, Politics and the Past: On Restoring Historical Injustice, and Old Europe, New Europe, and Core Europe: Transatlantic Relations After the Iraq War. He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Theory and Society and serves as editor of Temple University Press's "Politics, History, and Social Change" series. At the same time, he also serves as the host of the podcast "International Perspectives".
About the translator
Sun Yue
Sun Yue, a professor at the School of Foreign Chinese Languages at Capital Normal University, is mainly engaged in translation teaching and cross-cultural research on literature and history, and has devoted more to big history research in recent years. His main translations include Origins: The Great History of Everything, The Great History and the Future of Mankind, The Declaration of History, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community, etc.
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Introduction
Introduction
Chapter 1 The Age of the Moral Axis Chapter 2 The Age of the Material Axis Chapter 3 The Age of the Spiritual Axis
Translator's Postscript
Read the sample chapter
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However, the developments associated with the First Axial Age had no significant impact on the total amount of wealth possessed by humanity. The majority of the world's population continues to live at a relatively low level of survival, hunger and debilitating diseases often threaten people, and only a few elites enjoy considerable advantages but live no longer than the rest of the population. By and large, the situation did not change much before 1750. The eminent medieval historian Jacques Le Goff recently noted that "before the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century, there was only one real economy, and it was based on agriculture". Fernand Braudel called the world the "Biological Old Regime", a system with "a series of limitations, barriers, structures, proportions, and quantitative relations," all of which were "broken down in China and Europe" until the eighteenth century.
According to Terry Burke, the old biological system experienced "periods of population explosions, agricultural production surges, and trade booms, but then periodic existential crises, famine and disease triggered economic recessions"; This old biological system "dominated human affairs from the 1,000th century B.C. until 1750." Even if there was some improvement at the end of the Middle Ages, the overall level before 1750 was "still pitifully low by our present standards." Similarly, the eminent economist Robert W. Robert J. Gordon wrote that until the late eighteenth century "there were thousands of years with little economic growth," which is a summary of this economic view.
However, at this point in history, there was an astonishing economic development, and it became an even greater inequality than ever before, and the "West" suddenly took the lead over the "East". The Industrial Revolution then continued to accelerate, again, to borrow Gordon's words, "to produce the fastest and greatest change in history." Specifically, this astonishing historical juncture lasted from approximately 1750 to 1850, and the German historical theorist Reinhardt Kozelek even called it "Sattelzeit", which originally meant "saddle period", but a more appropriate translation might be the "hinge" or "axial" period. The latter two translations are more appropriate because Kozelek himself was most concerned with the historical consciousness or self-understanding that took place in this era.
In the early formative stages of this concept, Kozelek wrote that he was most interested in "the disintegration of the old world and the emergence of new worlds in the process, especially in the understanding of historical concepts". Most importantly, this new era is a testament to a rupture of experience and expectation, a sense of "contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous." In this sense, Kozelek's identification of the characteristics of this era is conceptually in common with those of the thinkers who invented the first concept of the "Axial Age", since the latter were also more or less concerned with the intellectual or ideological characteristics of the age.
However, over time, the word Sattelzeit has acquired many other meanings. Jürgen Osterhammel, in his authoritative historical work on the nineteenth century, examines the connotations of the seven different dimensions of Sattelzeit in order to make the reading of this concept more globally relevant, namely the relationship between the great powers and the "first era of global imperialism"; the beginning of the socio-political emancipation of European immigrants; the spread of nationalism; Civic participation in political decision-making began, albeit with little initial success; the emerging "estate-to-class" transition, slavery is increasingly challenged; "Modern" – that is, sustained and steady economic growth on the basis of the new energy system – is taking off in the world; and the very limited "globalization" that has emerged in the field of culture. However, the promotion of women's equality, the integration of former vassals into a thoroughly "democratic" form of government, the transformation of wars into activities carried out mainly by the poor around the world, and the full industrialization of many parts of the world, all of this will not happen until the twentieth century. Osterhammer's writings on the nineteenth century are a valuable reminder that many of what we think of as "modern life" are fairly recent inventions or discoveries, often less than a century old.
Broadly speaking, the great development that has come with the Sattelzeit has brought great improvements to human well-being, but it is based on the idea that it is antithetical to nature or ignores nature, so that this human-induced climate change and global warming puts humanity itself at great risk. The consequences of this paradoxical development have been pointed out by Nobel laureate Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer, who argued that the geological epoch in which we live today should be called the Anthropocene. They used the term to emphasize that humans have affected the environment in unprecedented ways, and thus created a new era on geological time scales. This new era is said to have begun in the late eighteenth century, and the designation was given to draw attention to the challenges facing humanity in terms of the viability of its ecological foundations.
The two scholars, of course, understood that the choice of a date for the beginning of a new era was inherently arbitrary, but the starting point they first proposed was precisely in the second half of the eighteenth century. "This period coincides with the beginning of rising concentrations of several 'greenhouse gases,' particularly carbon dioxide and methane," according to data extracted from glacier ice cores, which coincide with the invention of the steam engine by James Watt in 1784." "From this perspective, the advent of the Anthropocene essentially coincided with the Industrial Revolution, which relied heavily on fossil fuels, first coal and then oil. Recently, however, some scholars have pushed back the beginning of the Anthropocene to after 1950, based on data on rapid population growth and the dramatic impact of human factors on the biosphere. This is the so-called "Great Acceleration," a term that is said to be based on the political economist Karl Polanyi's "holistic understanding of the nature of modern society," which is embodied in his magnum opus, The Great Transformation. The question of determining the date of the beginning of the epoch may inevitably have been controversial all along, but the post-1950 theory is now more popular in academic circles.
Series Introduction
Twentieth Century Humanities Translation Series
Edited by Professor Chen Heng of Shanghai Normal University, the Twentieth Century Humanities Translation Series brings together the condensed translations of a number of influential classics in the field of humanities before and after the 20th century, covering theoretical discussions and empirical research in various disciplines and fields of humanities.