Download or read book Axial Civilizations And World History written by J©đhann P©Łll © rnason and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2005 with total page 586 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays by social theorists, historical sociologists and area specialists in classical, biblical and Asian studies. The contributions deal with cultural transformations in major civilizational centres during the "Axial Age," the middle centuries of the last millennium BCE, and their long-term consequences.
Download or read book The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations written by Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 572 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a new and original analysis of the great ancient civilizations, focusing on the breakthroughs and their institutionalization in Greece, Israel, China, and India. The conditions under which these civilizations developed are systematically explored. For comparative purposes, the civilization of Assyria, where such a breakthrough did not take place is analyzed. Attention is given to the transformation of modes of thought and symbolism. Special focus is brought to the development of the great religions and the perception of tension between the transcendental and mundane orders and between rulers and other elites.
Download or read book The Axial Age and Its Consequences written by Robert N. Bellah and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-31 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book makes the bold claim that intellectual sophistication was born worldwide during the middle centuries of the first millennium bce. From Axial Age thinkers we inherited a sense of the world as a place not just to experience but to investigate, envision, and alter. A variety of utopian visions emerged and led to both reform and repression.
Download or read book From World Religions to Axial Civilizations and Beyond written by Saïd Amir Arjomand and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2021-03-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The post–World War II idea of the Axial Age by Karl Jaspers, and as elaborated into the sociology of axial civilizations by S. N. Eisenstadt in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, continues to be the subject of intense scholarly debate. Examples of this can be found in recent works of Hans Joas and Jürgen Habermas. In From World Religions to Axial Civilizations and Beyond, an internationally distinguished group of scholars discuss, advance, and criticize the Jaspers-Eisenstadt thesis, and go beyond it by bringing in the critical influence of Max Weber's sociology of world religions and by exploring intercivilizational encounters in key world regions. The essays within this volume are of unusual interest for their original analysis of relatively neglected civilizational zones, especially Islam and the Islamicate civilization and the Byzantine civilization, and its continuation in Orthodox Russia.
Download or read book Practicing Transcendence written by Christopher Peet and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-06-05 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book introduces readers to the concept of the Axial Age and its relevance for a world in crisis. Scholars have become increasingly interested in philosopher Karl Jaspers’ thesis that a spiritual revolution in consciousness during the first millennium BCE decisively shaped world history. Axial ideas of transcendence develop into ideologies for world religions and civilizations, in turn coalescing into a Eurasian world-system that spreads globally to become the foundation of our contemporary world. Alongside ideas and ideologies, the Axial Age also taught spiritual practices critically resisting the new scale of civilizational power: in small counter-cultural communities on the margins of society, they turn our conscious focus inward to transform ourselves and overcome the destructive potentials within human nature. Axial spiritualities offer humanity a practical wisdom, a profound psychology, and deep hope: to transform despair into resilience, helping us face with courage the ecological and political challenges confronting us today.
Download or read book Seshat History of the Axial Age written by Jenny Reddish and published by Seshat Histories. This book was released on 2019-12-08 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Applying insights from a massive historical research project-Seshat: Global History Databank-this edited volume reveals that there was no single "Axial Age" in human history. Instead, it points to cross-cultural parallels in the co-evolution of egalitarian ideals and constraints on political authority with sociopolitical complexity. The first book-length publication to make use of Seshat's systematic approach to collecting information about the human past, Seshat History of the Axial Age expands the Axial Age debate beyond first-millennium BCE Eurasia. Fourteen chapters survey earlier and later periods as well as developments in regions previously neglected in Axial Age discussions. The conclusion? There was no identifiable Axial Age confined to a few Eurasian hotspots in the last millennium BCE. However, "axiality" as a cluster of traits emerged time and again whenever societies reached a certain threshold of scale and level of complexity. Co-editors Daniel Hoyer and Jenny Reddish paired some of the world's leading historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists with members of the Seshat team. Hoyer, Project Manager with Seshat, is a historian and social scientist specializing in cross-cultural historical analysis. Reddish, Seshat's Lead Editor, is an anthropologist working on the material correlates of cultural systems from societies around the world. She is based at the Complexity Science Hub, Vienna. Seshat: Global History Databank was founded in 2011 to bring together the most current and comprehensive knowledge about human history in one place, collecting what is known about the social and political organization of human societies to track how civilizations have evolved over time. Seshat History of the Axial Age is the first entry in the Seshat Histories series.
Download or read book Religion in Human Evolution written by Robert N. Bellah and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-15 with total page 777 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice An ABC Australia Best Book on Religion and Ethics of the Year Distinguished Book Award, Sociology of Religion Section of the American Sociological Association Religion in Human Evolution is a work of extraordinary ambition—a wide-ranging, nuanced probing of our biological past to discover the kinds of lives that human beings have most often imagined were worth living. It offers what is frequently seen as a forbidden theory of the origin of religion that goes deep into evolution, especially but not exclusively cultural evolution. “Of Bellah’s brilliance there can be no doubt. The sheer amount this man knows about religion is otherworldly...Bellah stands in the tradition of such stalwarts of the sociological imagination as Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. Only one word is appropriate to characterize this book’s subject as well as its substance, and that is ‘magisterial.’” —Alan Wolfe, New York Times Book Review “Religion in Human Evolution is a magnum opus founded on careful research and immersed in the ‘reflective judgment’ of one of our best thinkers and writers.” —Richard L. Wood, Commonweal
Download or read book Convenient Myths written by Iain Provan and published by . This book was released on 2019-09-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contemporary world has been shaped by two important and potent myths. Karl Jaspers' construct of the "axial age" envisions the common past (800-200 BC), the time when Western society was born and world religions spontaneously and independently appeared out of a seemingly shared value set. Conversely, the myth of the "dark green golden age," as narrated by David Suzuki and others, asserts that the axial age and the otherworldliness that accompanied the emergence of organized religion ripped society from a previously deep communion with nature. Both myths contend that to maintain balance we must return to the idealized past. In Convenient Myths, Iain Provan illuminates the influence of these two deeply entrenched and questionable myths, warns of their potential dangers, and forebodingly maps the implications of a world founded on such myths.
Download or read book Confucian Ethics of the Axial Age written by Heiner Roetz and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1993-10-05 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Confucian Ethics of the Axial Age describes the formative period of Chinese culture—the last centuries of the Zhou dynasty—as an early epoch of enlightenment. It comprehensively reconstructs the ethical discourse as thought gradually became emancipated from tradition and institutions. Rather than presenting a chronology of different thinkers and works, this book discusses the systematic aspects of moral philosophies. Based on original texts, Roetz focuses on filial piety; the conflict between the family and the state; the legitimating of the political order; the virtues of loyalty, friendship, and harmony; concepts of justice; the principle of humaneness and its different readings; the Golden Rule; the moral person; the autonomous self, motivation, decision and conscience; and various attempts to ground morality in religion, human nature, or reason. These topics are arranged in such a way that the genetic structure and the logical development of the moral reasoning becomes apparent. From this detached perspective, conventional morality is either rejected or critically reestablished under the restraint of new abstract and universal norms. This makes the Chinese developments part of the ancient worldwide movement of enlightenment of the axial age.
Download or read book The Origin and Goal of History written by Karl Jaspers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-03-28 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) was a German psychiatrist and philosopher and one of the most original European thinkers of the twentieth century. As a major exponent of existentialism in Germany, he had a strong influence on modern theology, psychiatry and philosophy. He was Hannah Arendt’s supervisor before her emigration to the United States in the 1930s and himself experienced the consequences of Nazi persecution. He was removed from his position at the University of Heidelberg in 1937, due to his wife being Jewish. Published in 1949, the year in which the Federal Republic of Germany was founded, The Origin and Goal of History is a vitally important book. It is renowned for Jaspers' theory of an 'Axial Age', running from the 8th to the 3rd century BCE. Jaspers argues that this period witnessed a remarkable flowering of new ways of thinking that appeared in Persia, India, China and the Greco-Roman world, in striking parallel development but without any obvious direct cultural contact between them. Jaspers identifies key thinkers from this age, including Confucius, Buddha, Zarathustra, Homer and Plato, who had a profound influence on the trajectory of future philosophies and religions. For Jaspers, crucially, it is here that we see the flowering of diverse philosophical beliefs such as scepticism, materialism, sophism, nihilism, and debates about good and evil, which taken together demonstrate human beings' shared ability to engage with universal, humanistic questions as opposed to those mired in nationality or authoritarianism. At a deeper level, The Origin and Goal of History provides a crucial philosophical framework for the liberal renewal of German intellectual life after 1945, and indeed of European intellectual life more widely, as a shattered continent attempted to find answers to what had happened in the preceding years. This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Foreword by Christopher Thornhill.
Download or read book Empires written by Susan E. Alcock and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-08-09 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Empires, the largest political systems of the ancient and early modern world, powerfully transformed the lives of people within and even beyond their frontiers in ways quite different from other, non-imperial societies. Appearing in all parts of the globe, and in many different epochs, empires invite comparative analysis - yet few attempts have been made to place imperial systems within such a framework. This book brings together studies by distinguished scholars from diverse academic traditions, including anthropology, archaeology, history and classics. The empires discussed include case studies from Central and South America, the Mediterranean, Europe, the Near East, South East Asia and China, and range in time from the first millennium BC to the early modern era. The book organises these detailed studies into five thematic sections: sources, approaches and definitions; empires in a wider world; imperial integration and imperial subjects; imperial ideologies; and the afterlife of empires.
Download or read book Religious Evolution and the Axial Age written by Stephen K. Sanderson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-01-25 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious Evolution and the Axial Age describes and explains the evolution of religion over the past ten millennia. It shows that an overall evolutionary sequence can be observed, running from the spirit and shaman dominated religions of small-scale societies, to the archaic religions of the ancient civilizations, and then to the salvation religions of the Axial Age. Stephen K. Sanderson draws on ideas from new cognitive and evolutionary psychological theories, as well as comparative religion, anthropology, history, and sociology. He argues that religion is a biological adaptation that evolved in order to solve a number of human problems, especially those concerned with existential anxiety and ontological insecurity. Much of the focus of the book is on the Axial Age, the period in the second half of the first millennium BCE that marked the greatest religious transformation in world history. The book demonstrates that, as a result of massive increases in the scale and scope of war and large-scale urbanization, the problems of existential anxiety and ontological insecurity became particularly acute. These changes evoked new religious needs, especially for salvation and release from suffering. As a result entirely new religions-Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism-arose to help people cope with the demands of the new historical era.
Download or read book The Measure of Civilization written by Ian Morris and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-27 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking look at Western and Eastern social development from the end of the ice age to today In the past thirty years, there have been fierce debates over how civilizations develop and why the West became so powerful. The Measure of Civilization presents a brand-new way of investigating these questions and provides new tools for assessing the long-term growth of societies. Using a groundbreaking numerical index of social development that compares societies in different times and places, award-winning author Ian Morris sets forth a sweeping examination of Eastern and Western development across 15,000 years since the end of the last ice age. He offers surprising conclusions about when and why the West came to dominate the world and fresh perspectives for thinking about the twenty-first century. Adapting the United Nations' approach for measuring human development, Morris's index breaks social development into four traits—energy capture per capita, organization, information technology, and war-making capacity—and he uses archaeological, historical, and current government data to quantify patterns. Morris reveals that for 90 percent of the time since the last ice age, the world's most advanced region has been at the western end of Eurasia, but contrary to what many historians once believed, there were roughly 1,200 years—from about 550 to 1750 CE—when an East Asian region was more advanced. Only in the late eighteenth century CE, when northwest Europeans tapped into the energy trapped in fossil fuels, did the West leap ahead. Resolving some of the biggest debates in global history, The Measure of Civilization puts forth innovative tools for determining past, present, and future economic and social trends.
Download or read book Ancient Worlds written by Michael Scott and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "As panoramic as it is learned, this is ancient history for our globalized world." Tom Holland, author of Dynasty and Rubicon Twenty-five-hundred years ago, civilizations around the world entered a revolutionary new era that overturned old order and laid the foundation for our world today. In the face of massive social changes across three continents, radical new forms of government emerged; mighty wars were fought over trade, religion, and ideology; and new faiths were ruthlessly employed to unify vast empires. The histories of Rome and China, Greece and India-the stories of Constantine and Confucius, Qin Shi Huangdi and Hannibal-are here revealed to be interconnected incidents in the midst of a greater drama. In Ancient Worlds, historian Michael Scott presents a gripping narrative of this unique age in human civilization, showing how diverse societies responded to similar pressures and how they influenced one another: through conquest and conversion, through trade in people, goods, and ideas. An ambitious reinvention of our grandest histories, Ancient Worlds reveals new truths about our common human heritage. "A bold and imaginative page-turner that challenges ideas about the world of antiquity." Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads
Download or read book The Cambridge World History written by Jerry H. Bentley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The era from 1400 to 1800 saw intense biological, commercial, and cultural exchanges, and the creation of global connections on an unprecedented scale. Divided into two books, Volume 6 of the Cambridge World History series considers these critical transformations. The first book examines the material and political foundations of the era, including global considerations of the environment, disease, technology, and cities, along with regional studies of empires in the eastern and western hemispheres, crossroads areas such as the Indian Ocean, Central Asia, and the Caribbean, and sites of competition and conflict, including Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Mediterranean. The second book focuses on patterns of change, examining the expansion of Christianity and Islam, migrations, warfare, and other topics on a global scale, and offering insightful detailed analyses of the Columbian exchange, slavery, silver, trade, entrepreneurs, Asian religions, legal encounters, plantation economies, early industrialism, and the writing of history.
Download or read book The Three Axial Ages written by John Torpey and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-01 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How should we think about the “shape” of human history since the birth of cities, and where are we headed? Sociologist and historian John Torpey proposes that the “Axial Age” of the first millennium BCE, when some of the world’s major religious and intellectual developments first emerged, was only one of three such decisive periods that can be used to directly affect present social problems, from economic inequality to ecological destruction. Torpey’s argument advances the idea that there are in fact three “Axial Ages,” instead of one original Axial Age and several subsequent, smaller developments. Each of the three ages contributed decisively to how humanity lives, and the difficulties it faces. The earliest, or original, Axial Age was a moral one; the second was material, and revolved around the creation and use of physical objects; and the third is chiefly mental, and focused on the technological. While there are profound risks and challenges, Torpey shows how a worldview that combines the strengths of all three ages has the potential to usher in a period of exceptional human freedom and possibility.
Download or read book Beyond Civilization written by Harry Redner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-03-26 with total page 676 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For Harry Redner, the phrase "beyond civilization" refers to the new and unprecedented condition the world is now entering‘specifically, the condition commonly known as globalization. Redner approaches globalization from the perspective of history and seeks to interpret it in relation to previous key stages of human development. His account begins with the Axial Age (700 300 BC) and proceeds through Modernity (after AD 1500) to the present global condition. What is globalization doing to civilization? In answering this question, Redner studies the role played by capitalism, the state, science and technology. He aims to show that they have had a catalytic impact on civilization through their reductive effect on society, culture, and individualism. However, Redner is not content to diagnose the ills of civilization; he also suggests how they might be ameliorated by cultural conservation. Above all, it is to the problem of decline in the higher forms of literacy that he addresses himself, for it is on the culture of the book that previous civilizations were founded. This study will be of interest to sociologists, historians, and social and political theorists. Its style makes it accessible also to general readers, interested in civilization past, present, and future.
