From the Axial Age to the Moral Revolution

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* Book: From the Axial Age to the Moral Revolution: John Stuart-Glennie, Karl Jaspers, and a New Understanding of the Idea. by Eugene Halton. Palgrave Pivot, (2014)

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Published in Existenz, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2018. A full pdf is available on the journal Existenz website: https://www.existenz.us/volume13No2.html


Description

"In 1873, John Stuart Stuart-Glennie elaborated a theory of 'the moral revolution' to characterize the historical shift from roughly 600 BCE in a variety of civilizations, as part of a critical theory of history. This book brings light to the now eclipsed theory and offers new contexts and understandings of the phenomenon."


Eugene Halton:

"Thus far most of the scholarship on the axial age has followed Karl Jaspers’ denial that nature could be a significant source and continuing influence in the historical development of human consciousness. Yet more than a half century before Jaspers, the originator of the first nuanced theory of what Jaspers termed the axial age, John Stuart-Glennie, mapped out a contrasting philosophy of history that allowed a central role to nature in historical human development. This essay concerns issues related to my book, From the Axial Age to the Moral Revolution, and begins with a discussion of how I came to uncover the forgotten work of John Stuart-Glennie. Although Jaspers and Stuart-Glennie each drew similar conclusions regarding many of the facts of the moral revolution respectively the Axial Age, there are significant differences in their philosophies of history, concerning, for example the problem, whether history can be regarded deterministically or as an open whole, and whether nature can be a source of profound spiritual significance and even transcendence or whether that realm is limited to historical consciousness. I also briefly discuss two other overlooked contributors, namely D. H. Lawrence, who wrote on the phenomena twenty years before Jaspers, and Lewis Mumford, who is one of the first writers to draw from Jaspers' work. I then respond to four diverse scholarly essays on my book, delineating in the process my own philosophy of history as a progress in precision, paradoxically counteracted by a regressive contraction of mind."


Review

Recommendation by Mark Whitaker:

"It is the only other book I have found that shows a similar thesis to what I talked about in Ecological Revolution: about the 'pre-axial' contexts of deeply environmentalist ethics, traditionalist anti-humanism, and regionality of mutually hatreds of people that existed still in first states. The elite ideological appeals of these first states (not really talked about by Jaspers or Stuart-Glennie though) falling apart and the ecological revolution as both ecological/humanist as ideas becoming more humanocentric; Stuart-Glennie called the pre-axial context 'panzoonism' and it moved into his 'moral revolution'. He wrote about this in the 1870s and talked widely around 1905 yet died in 1910 and left without intellectual heirs. Seems even Jaspers unaware of him inventing the ‘axial’ thesis 70 years before Jaspers wrote on it. This is an interesting book I saved as a link a long time ago and just came back across the link: it talks about the intersection of Stuart-Glennie, Jaspers, and Lewis Mumford and a few others on the different ways they thought about this concept. It is a short book of 160 pages. I will read it in more detail soon, because it is interesting to me, and because it talks more about Lewis Mumford (from whom I first learned about Jaspers’ axial age ideas), and Mumford is indeed ignored by the ‘main axial scholars’ of Eisenstat, Wittrock, Bellah ,etc., as Halton notes."

(personal email, September 2021)


Discussion

Special issue of the journal Existenz:

The Axial Age, The Moral Revolution, and the Polarization of Life and Spirit

URL = https://www.existenz.us/volumes/Vol.13-2Halton.pdf

Eugene Halton | University of Notre Dame

The essay concerns issues related to my book, From the Axial Age to the Moral Revolution, and begins with a discussion of how I came to uncover the forgotten work of John Stuart-Glennie, who some seventy-five years before Jaspers proposed a comprehensive theory of the phenomena described by Karl Jaspers as the Axial Age. Although they each drew similar conclusions regarding many of the facts of the moral revolution respectively the Axial Age, there are significant differences in their philosophies of history, concerning, for example the problem, whether history can be regarded deterministically or as an open whole, and whether nature can be a source of profound spiritual significance and even transcendence or whether that realm is limited to historical consciousness. I also briefly discuss two other overlooked contributors, namely D. H. Lawrence, who wrote on the phenomena twenty years before Jaspers, and Lewis Mumford, who is one of the first writers to draw from Jaspers' work. I then respond to four diverse scholarly essays on my book.


Context and Meaning of the Axial Age Concept: Comparing the Formulations of John Stuart-Glennie and Karl Jaspers

URL = https://www.existenz.us/volumes/Vol.13-2Lidz.pdf

Victor Lidz | Drexel University

John Stuart-Glennie's concept of the Moral Revolution of the sixth century BCE is compared with Karl Jaspers' concept of the Axial Age lasting from 800 to 200 BCE. I praise Eugene Halton's revival of Stuart-Glennie's work, but hold Jaspers' treatment, built on the scholarship of Max Weber, to be the rightful source of much contemporary research on the development of world civilizations. Like Weber, Jaspers underscored differences among the developmental paths of the great civilizations of China, India, Classical Antiquity, Islam, and the Modern West; Stuart-Glennie treated them as being basically similar, deriving from a Moral Revolution that was fundamentally alike across civilizations.


Reflections on Axiality: Evolutionary Legacy or Historical Consciousness?

URL = https://www.existenz.us/volumes/Vol.13-2Peet.pdf

Christopher Peet | The King's University, Canada

Eugene Halton's book makes a significant contribution to scholarship on the Axial Age. Halton provides a summary of the alternative formulations of the Axial Age thesis by John S. Stuart-Glennie, Lewis Mumford, and D. H. Lawrence that considerably corrects the current Jaspers-centric bias of scholarship. His consideration of Stuart-Glennie's articulation of panzooinism opens up a more nuanced and differentiated appreciation of the human evolutionary legacy that precedes the Axial Age. However it is unclear how this evolutionary legacy is effectively active within historical consciousness. Further, in conceptualizing this legacy he overlooks the degree of violence of hunter-gatherer tribalism, and overestimates the viability of their life-style as modeling sustainability. Insofar as the world religions overvalue the Axial Age, Halton's laudable goal of contributing to a sustainability revolution will prove ineffectual by comparison to Jaspers' thesis, the difference between them turning on the question of evolutionary legacy vis-à-vis effective historical consciousness.


John Stuart Stuart-Glennie versus Karl Jaspers: A Quixotic Quest?

URL = https://www.existenz.us/volumes/Vol.13-2Turner.pdf

Bryan S. Turner | Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, and Potsdam University, Germany

Theories of an Axial Age (800-200 BCE) in which humanity, moral consciousness, ethics and religious sensibility came into existence have been connected to Karl Jaspers as the principal originator of them. Such theories claim that nothing new has been added to human culture since that Achsenzeit. This academic wisdom has been challenged by Eugene Halton who shows convincingly if repetitiously that the idea of an Axial Age was developed by John Stuart Stuart-Glennie some seventy-five years before Jaspers under the heading of the Moral Revolution. Halton also claims that similar ideas were put forward by Lewis Mumford and D. H. Lawrence. As an academic detective story, Halton's book is successful, but what is the intellectual reward of such an exercise? One answer is that the focus on nature and technology in both Stuart-Glennie and Mumford provides the basis for an inquiry into a new technological transformation that is post-axial. Such an inquiry is found in Halton's concluding chapter on "The Moral Revolution and the Modern Revolution Today." Halton argues that Stuart-Glennie has been neglected for his theories were too complicated and he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.


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