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 (2014)

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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)