Bjørn Thomassen’s most recent article has now been published in the peer-reviewed Journal, Anthropological Theory. The article is entitled, “Anthropology, multiple modernities and the axial age debate”. The article suggests a need to link the anthropological debate of multiple modernities more closely to Weberian social theory, elaborated among others by Shmul Eisenstadt and Eric Voegelin. This involves a discussion of the anthropological contribution to the understanding of modernity. In this context, the article discusses the “axial age” as an important background to the “multiple modernities” of the present.
In his comparative essays on the World religions, Max Weber made allusions to the strange contemporaneity of the most important developments in thought and spirituality in Israel, Greece, India and China, but leaving this ‘coincidence’ without a full discussion. It was Karl Jaspers who, in the aftermath of WWII, came up with the explicit idea that the period 800-200 BC should be considered as the ‘axis time’ of history. Noting the striking similarities of such spiritual or cultural revolutions in Greece, Persia, China and India within a relatively restricted period between 800 BC and 200 BC, and concentrated around the middle of the first millennium BC, Jaspers baptised this period the ‘axial age’ of world history, in contrast to the Christian calendar and its place-specific year 0.
The article is closely connected to Professor Thomassen’s teaching at the AUR, and especially to his courses on political theory, globalization and anthropology. Bjørn Thomassen is Chair of the Department of International Relations.
