1. Report of the conference:

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2. Papers (with password only):

Papers of the Conference contributions (for participants only): >>here<< .

3. Abstracts:

Johann Arnason, La Trobe University (Victoria,
   Australia)
Jan Assmann, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg
   (Heidelberg, Germany)
Robert N. Bellah, University of California (Berkeley,
   USA)
José Casanova, Georgetown University (Washington
   D.C., USA)
Merlin Donald, Queen's University (Kingston, Canada)
Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Hebrew University (Jerusalem,
   Israel)
Jürgen Habermas, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Univer-
   sität (Frankfurt a.M., Germany)
Hans Joas, University of Erfurt: Max Weber Center for
   Advanced Cultural and Social Studies (Erfurt, Germany)
Matthias Jung, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der
   Wissenschaften (Berlin, Germany)
Richard Madsen, University of California (San Diego,
   USA)
Manos Marangudakis, University of the Aegean
   (Mytilene, Greece)
David Martin, London School of Economics and Political
   Science (London, UK)
Mohammad Nafissi , London Metropolitan University
   (London, UK)
Gananath Obeyesekere, Princeton University
   (Princeton, USA)
Heiner Roetz, Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Bochum,
   Germany)
W. Garry Runciman, Trinity College (Cambridge, UK)
William M. Sullivan, The Carnegie Foundation for the
   Advancement of Teaching (Stanford, USA)
Ann Swidler, University of California (Berkeley, USA)
Charles Taylor, McGill University (Montreal, Canada)
Steven M. Tipton, Emory University (Atlanta, USA)
Björn Wittrock, Swedish Collegium for Advanced
   Study (Uppsala, Sweden)

Johann Arnason

Jan Assmann

Robert N. Bellah
The Heritage of the Axial Age: Resource or Burden?
Reference to the Axial Age, when the great world civilizations first appeared in history, can easily appear triumphalist. Didn't ethical universalism and the beginnings of science emerge at that time and what is modernity except a culmination of those beginnings? We have, however, come to question the idea of the march of Reason through history so that it is probably a mistake to understand the axial age as the opening act of an inevitable drama. Because we still read texts written in the axial age while very few know much about what came before, it is easy to ignore what we still owe to pre-axial cultures. The mimetic (gestural) culture that preceded the axial age by perhaps a million years and the narrative culture that preceded it by one or two hundred thousand years provide the basis of our humanity. The emergence of theoretic culture in the axial age has provided a challenge to those older cultural forms, in some ways recovering them, in other ways obliterating them. Many of our present cultural problems arise from the continuing tensions between axial and pre-axial cultural forms in a period when theoretic culture makes claims to be the sole valid way of relating to the world.

José Casanova

Merlin Donald

Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt
The Axial Conundrum - between Transcendental Visions and Vicissitudes of their Institutionalizations - Constructive and Destructive Possibilities
In this paper I shall examine the tensions and contradictions attendant on the institutionalization of the Axial visions. These tensions are rooted first in the very problematics inherent in the institutionalization of the Axial visions - i.e. in terms of the necessity to cope with regulation of power, economy, constitution of collectivities and their autonomous tendencies.
Second, I shall examine how these tensions are rooted in the internal structure of the Axial visions - above all in the tensions between on the one hand the inclusivist universalistic components thereof, and on the other hand paradoxically enough, in the exclusivist tendencies inherent in universalistic orientations and in the destructive potentialities they entail. These problems point out to the continual tensions between constructive and destructive potential inherent in the very tendency to social and cultural expansion and evolution.

Hans Joas

Jürgen Habermas

Matthias Jung
Embodiment, Transcendence and Contingency - Anthropological Features of the Axial Age
The discovery of transcendence in the Axial Age has many facets, among them a new understanding of signs as man-made symbols for meanings that inevitably transcend the process of signifying. This achievement can be seen as the conscious and historically path-dependent appropriation of something already implicit in the phylogeny of symbolic competences, namely its power to release communication from the constraints of physical contact with the environment. Nevertheless symbolic meaning still presupposes embodied relations to the world, in the form of qualitative situations and local interactions. This created a perennial anthropological tension and partly explains one of the most fascinating aspects of the Axial Age concept, namely its ability to create new connections between important ongoing debates in sociology, religious studies, evolutionary and philosophical anthropology. My paper focuses on the development of a conceptual framework that would enable us to understand these connections better by seeing the axial age's breakthroughs as related to anthropological questions of sign-usage and expressivity.

Richard Madsen

Manos Marangudakis
Eutopia: The Promise of Biotechnology and the Realignment of Western Axiality
Biotechnology, and the widder fields of Genetics, Robotics, Information technology and Nanotechnology (GRIN) promise to deliver a tangible perfection of flesh, and an equally corporeal personal bliss; I will call this promise 'eutopia', an actual and tangible utopia, a 'laboratory on the hill'. The essay is about the deep perceptual and social changes these advanced applications of biotechnology could bring in the West. It examines the probable collapse of two related but distinct perceptual bipolarities the western mind and social mobilization has been based upon for centuries: Athens-Jerusalem, and physis-environment; a collapse that if the biotechnological promise is delivered, would reshape radically western perceptions of self and of nature and remodel established constellations and modes of social mobilization and social organization, merging current political opponents and splitting current social alliences into pro- and anti-eutopic camps.

David Martin

Mohammad Nafissi
Islam and the Ends of the Axial Age
This paper considers Islamicate's transformation from " a remarkably modern religion" (R. Bellah, 'Islamic traditions and the problems of modernization' in Beyond Belief, 1970: 150) to the least competent to respond to secular modernity's (only apparent?) resolution of what Shmuel Eisenstadt has called the central cultural [and political] question of the axial age.
In his influential restatement of what may be called the axial civilisations research programme, Eisenstadt contrasts pagan societies' "homologous conceptions of mundane and transmundane worlds" with those of "Axial age civilizations [in which] the perception of a sharp disjunction between… [these worlds] developed." The fundamental question facing these civilizations thus became "the ways in which the chasm between the transcendental and the mundane orders could be bridged." (The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations, 1986: 3) If subsequently the axial civilizations crystallize around distinct regimes for managing the relationship between the sword and the pen, the church and the state, coercion and persuasion, power and culture, then Mohammad's mission ushers a new era by bridging the two sides in the world's first fully fledged and documented theocracy. True to the universal message of the moment of its sacred birth, the emerging Islamicate displayed an extensive reach that drew on and claimed the legacy of just about all the axial patterns and in the process was turned it into "the globalizing civilization par excellence." (J. Arnason, 'The emergence of Islam as a case of cultural crystalization: historical and comparative reflections' in Arnason et al. eds. Islam in Process, 2006: 98) Considering the rise of this civilization as the outcome of "the greatest [failed?!] attempt ever made to implement one of the basic concepts of the Axial age: the end of history", Jon Retsö suggests that "we have to wait for the great European revolutions to find a similar combination of revolutionary ideology and activism but now without the overtly religious dimension." ('Arabia and the heritage of the Axial Age' in J. Arnason et al. eds. Axial Civilizations and World History, 2005: 355-6).
Viewing Islam and the axial problematic from this end of history , this paper clears the ground for connecting Islamicate's rise, decline and potential renewal by examining and drawing on the alternative, 'orientalist', 'anti-orientalist' and 'apologist' accounts that respectively condemn, ignore or excuse Islam in their accounts of the rise of fundamentalist Islam and other "troubles in the Middle East". The paper concludes by attempting to outline the implications of its critical and causal analysis for the axial age/multiple modernities research agenda.

Gananath Obeyesekere

Heiner Roetz

W. G. (Garry) Runciman
Righteous Rebels: When, Where, and Why?
In the long history of human competition and conflict, the disposition to censure the behaviour of free-riders towards reciprocators, of defectors towards promise-keepers, and of self-aggrandizers towards the weak and defenceless goes back long before the transition from cultural to social evolution - that is, from behaviour which is the acting-out of information interpersonally transmitted by imitation and learning to behaviour which is the acting-out of information encoded in rule-governed practices which define institutional roles. But righteous rebellions, in which would-be usurpers of power are organized in movements of protest challenging existing rulers' right to rule by reference to a transcendental moral standard and an ethic of salvation, are, in European history at any rate, a very late development. They are nowhere to be found in the pre-Christian Graeco-Roman world. For all the originality and importance of Greek philosophy and Roman law, neither can be comfortably fitted within the framework of an 'Axial Age Revolution' as conceived by Karl Jaspers and expounded by Shmuel Eisenstadt. 'Ancient' Greece and Rome did experience modernizations of their own. But these were very different from the 'modern' modernization which generated righteous rebels on the model of Luther, Robespierre, and Lenin.

William M. Sullivan
The Axial Invention of Education and Today's Global Knowledge Culture
Education as the conscious effort to form-and reform-human individuals and society is one of the great legacies of the Axial turn to the contemporary global era. Today's global expansion of a model of education pioneered in the West during recent centuries has established a set of institutions and cultural norms that everywhere promote ideals of individual agency rooted in capacities for manipulating abstract, analytical concepts. The agents of such knowledge are understood to be rights-bearing individuals capable of entering into political relations and market transactions for mutual benefit.
While these ideals have recognizable Axial roots and antecedents, today's global educational culture is both intolerant of non-theoretic forms of knowledge and militant. By contrast, during the long post-Axial period that preceded modernity educational ideals proposed by the Axial movements functioned in rough symbiosis with more particularistic, mythical images and models of human identity and solidarity. The custody of these hybrid cultures was largely the charge of intellectual, usually religious elites who, for both good and ill, became experts in the maintenance, and occasional reworking, of common rituals, myths, and symbols upon which the post-Axial civilizations depended.
Through its formative institutions, particularly the university, today's global educational culture forms elites for very different missions. This culture trusts wholly in the theoretic while it typically either ignores or directly challenges tradition-based understandings of identity and selfhood, often dismissing these as rooted in the more particularistic understandings of inherited religions. In doing so, however, the global educational culture also ignores the bases of its own achievements and aspirations in ideals and forms of social solidarity that first appeared in the Axial religious movements.
Like other aspects of today's liberal world order, global educational institutions as currently structured seem unable to contain the disintegrative and alienating forces their very spread and success have spawned. How might a better understanding of the Axial era and its tensions inform a reshaping of global educational culture that could realign theoretic reason with moral-practical sources of understanding?

Ann Swidler

Charles Taylor
The Notion of an Unqualified Good as the New Element in the Axial Transition and its Consequences for Modernity
The basic theses that I want to defend are:
1. A thesis about the long-term history of religion, which turns on a view about the Axial age: my point being that a religious life which involved "feeding the gods", and where the understanding of human good was that of prospering or flourishing (as this was understood); and where the "gods" or spirits were not necessarily unambiguously on the side of human good; this kind of life undergoes a change in which a) there is notion of a higher, more complete human good, a notion of complete virtue, or even of a salvation beyond human flourishing (Buddha), but at the same time b) the higher powers on this view are unambiguously on the side of human good. What may survive is a notion of Satan or Mara, which are spirits not ambiguous, but totally against human good.
2. The resulting religious life in the post-Axial age combines elements of the pre-Axial in some kind of amalgam, often unstable. The post-Axial pushes towards individual spiritual "virtuosi", to use Max Weber's phrase (monks, Bhikkhus, Platonist sages, etc.). The great "higher" religions, which become entrenched within and help to shape civilizations, have this hybrid character and the resultant tensions.
3. In Latin Christendom, we get an upsetting of this shaky equilibrium, in the long movement of Reform (beginning with Hildebrand, but carrying through the Reformation, Counter-Reformation, etc.
5. What we call "disenchantment" has as long-term consequence the elimination of instability. There is no more a shaky equilibrium between different forms of religious life (e.g., the end of Carnival). This is perhaps a disaster.

Steven M. Tipton
From Axial Souls to Modern Selves
The integrity of souls created to be saved in axial-age religions gives way to the moral contrariety of modern selves divided by the institutional differentiation of internally rationalized social spheres of moral value and practical virtue at odds with one another, as Max Weber wrote in "Science as a Vocation." What new light does a much more dynamic picture of religious evolution, in all its archaic-to-axial moral transformation and contestation, shed on this classical paradigm of modern moral disintegration and its critical interlocutors in social theory, philosophy, and psychology? This paper draws on Robert Bellah's work on religious evolution to begin to answer this question.

Björn Wittrock