From the Axial Age to the Moral Revolution

* 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)

More information

• panel conversation on the ideas in the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01qgsttbSEo