The Review of Politics, Vol. 70, No. 1, Special Issue on Comparative Political Theory (Winter, 2008), pp. 23-39
Abstract: Karl Jaspers coined the term the “axial period” to refer to what he saw as the simultaneous development in several different and separate societies-China, India, Iran, Israel, Greece-of “a new departure within mankind.” What he meant has been characterized as “a kind of critical, reflective questioning of the actual and a new vision of what lies beyond.” While it is true that people in each of these separate cultures began to develop new ways of talking about the cosmos, ethics, and community, Jaspers’s approach and description of these phenomena were, I shall argue, highly defective. This has led to serious misunderstandings of what was involved.
