World Religions and Social Thought

From Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber

to Jürgen Habermas and Hans Joas

Religiones del mundo y pensamiento

social

Desde Ernst Troeltsch y Max Weber

a Jürgen Habermas y Hans Joas

Björn Wittrock

Professor Emeritus at Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden. Chair of the Social Sciences

Section and Vice-President ex ofcio of the Academia Europaea. Founding Director of the

Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study and its principal leader from 1996 to 2018. He has

also served as President of the International Institute of Sociology. Correo electrónico: bjorn.

[email protected]

http://dx.doi.org/10.22529/sp.2025.65.08

STUDIA POLITICÆ Número 65 otoño 2025 pág. 159–197

Recibido: 15/10/2024 | Aceptado: 04/12/2024

Publicada por la Facultad de Ciencia Política y Relaciones Internacionales

de la Universidad Católica de Córdoba, Córdoba, República Argentina.

Abstract

This paper was drafted on occasion of Hans Joas’ 70

birthday, and publi-

shed in German, in the book edited by M. Schlette, B. Hollstein, M. Jung

and W. Knobl (2022), under the title Idealbildung, Sakralisierung, Reli-

gion. Beiträge zu Hans Joas’ Die Macht des Heiligen. After highlighting

the contributions of Joas’ social philosophy, Wittrock shows the main traits

of the history of social theory regarding the scientic research of world

160 STUDIA POLITICÆ Nº 65 otoño 2025

religions. This reconstruction places the questions asked and the answers

provided within their historical context, while at the same time it identies

some persisting questions, such as the place and role of world religions

compared to other religious phenomena, or that of the relationship between

Christianity and Modernity. Further, a central asset of this article is the

reconstruction of the sociological and philosophical understanding of the

Axial Age. After these preparatory and reconstructive parts, Wittrock fo-

cuses his analysis upon the most recent works —until then— of Habermas

and Joas regarding the discourse on the Axial Age, in order to show their

tensions and inherent capabilities facing the current experiences of secula-

rization and transcendence.

Keywords: world religions - social theory - modernity - secularization -

transcendence

Resumen

Este trabajo fue escrito con ocasión del festejo de los 70 años de Hans Joas,

y publicado en alemán en el libro editado por M. Schlette, B. Hollstein,

M. Jung and W. Knobl (2022), con el título Idealbildung, Sakralisierung,

Religion. Beiträge zu Hans Joas’ Die Macht des Heiligen. Después de re-

saltar las contribuciones de la losofía social de Joas, Wittrock muestra los

principales rasgos de la historia de la teoría social con relación a la inves-

tigación cientíca de las religiones mundiales. Esta reconstrucción ubica

en cada contexto histórico las preguntas que se hicieron y las respuestas

que se proveyeron, mientras que al mismo tiempo identica algunas pre-

guntas persistentes, tales como el lugar y el rol de las religiones mundiales

en comparación con otros fenómenos religiosos, o respecto de la relación

entre cristianismo y modernidad. Además, un aporte central de este artículo

es la reconstrucción de las interpretaciones sociológicas y losócas de la

era axial. Después de estas partes preparatorias y reconstructivas, Wittrock

enfoca su análisis en las obras hasta ese momento más recientes de Ha-

bermas y Joas relacionadas con la era axial, para mostrar sus tensiones y

capacidades inherentes frente a las experiencias actuales de secularización

y trascendencia.

Palabras clave: religiones mundiales - teoría social - modernidad - secula-

rización - trascendencia

Hans Joas and his oeuvre: Introductory Remarks

In the course of an extraordinary scholarly career, Hans Joas has, in publica

tions from the 1970s onwards, recast our conception of the nature of social

theory.

BJÖRN WITTROCK 161

During this period, he has held positions at a number of distinguished scho-

larly institutions starting with his alma mater, the Free University of Berlin,

and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. He has sub-

sequently been Director of the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and

Social Studies at the University of Erfurt. and then a Permanent Fellow of the

Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Freiburg. Since

the year 2000 he is a regularly recurring Visiting Professor of sociology and

social thought at the University of Chicago where he is a Member of the

Committee on Social Thought and a Professor in the Department of Sociolo-

gy. Hans Joas is now Ernst Troeltsch Professor for the Sociology of Religion

at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He has also held visiting positions at

many universities and institutes for advanced study across the world, inclu-

ding positions at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and the Swedish Collegium

for Advanced Study in Uppsala, where he has also served as a Non-resident

Long-term Fellow.

His achievements have been honoured through scholarly prizes, including

the René König Prize, the Bielefeld Luhmann Prize, the Hans Kilian Award,

Prix Paul Ricoeur, the Max Planck Research Award, as well as through mem

bership in academies and by honorary doctorates (in Tübingen and Uppsala).

Hans Joas has elaborated a research programme that has entailed a reinter

pretation of the history and commitments of sociology and social theory. This

has involved the establishment of new links between scholarly traditions, not

least between American-based traditions of pragmatism and European-origi-

nated social theories of a phenomenological and hermeneutic orientation but

also scholarship of a conceptual historical nature.

He has also expounded the implications of this reinterpretation through an

engagement and an educationally lucid presentation of the developments of

main currents in social theory. His monograph, co-authored with Wolfgang

Knöbl, Sozialtheorie. Zwanzig einführende Vorlesungen [Social Theory:

Twenty Introductory Lectures], is but one prominent example of this (Joas &

Knöbl, 2004/2009).

In the last instance, Hans Joas engages with the conditions for human beings

to understand and to act in a world that poses seemingly insurmountable

problems of an epistemic, moral and existential nature. This engagement has

characterized his oeuvre from his earliest works onwards in which he was

able, e.g., to demonstrate that intellectually seminal links exist between prag

matism and classical European social theory and philosophy of action.

162 STUDIA POLITICÆ Nº 65 otoño 2025

He has explored these ideas in a series of works. In his book on The Creativi-

ty of Action (Joas, 1992/1996), he outlines a comprehensive theory of action.

In particular, this book refuses to reduce the problem of action to a problem

of the nature of means-ends-rationality. Instead he proposed that other types

of action also be included, be they norm-guided actions or forms of transfor-

mative action that Hans Joas has analysed in terms of the creativity of action.

In a further step, Joas extended his inquiry to include studies of processes

of the constitution and emergence of values and of commitments that come

to identify the core of a human being. This is a main theme of his book on

Die Entstehung der Werte [The Genesis of Values] (Joas, 1997/2001). Throu

gh this move he was also able to open up a realm of research that both the

neo-analytical and the linguistic-interpretive scholars had tended to place

outside of their concern and as external to analysis of action proper.

Hans Joas then pursued an analysis of ways in which value commitments

are consolidated and contested on a collective level as well as an analysis of

norm-guided actions. His major study of this type had a focus on the emer

gence and the articulation of basic human rights over long periods of time

and in different contexts. This work was presented in a major volume on

The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights (Joas

2011/2013).

The book stimulated a dialogue between scholars in social theory and those

with a focus on legal theory. It also provided an example of how universalis

tic claims, inherent in notions of human rights, are not specic to a particular,

occidental, tradition but might be arrived at from a starting point in different

cultural, societal and religious traditions. With this project, Hans Joas (2013)

broached issues that had preoccupied Ernst Troeltsch in Troeltsch’s efforts

to discern pathways whereby human agents from different societal and reli-

gious backgrounds, might, through human interaction and interpretation, ar-

ticulate a commitment of a universalistic nature, yet expressed with recourse

to different vocabularies and traditions.

Hans Joas’ research on the genesis of values and the origins of a notions of

the sacredness of the person had also links to Joas publications on the cultu

ral values of Europe and on world religions and on the possibilities to extend

an action-based analysis to processes of global change. With this step Joas

once again touched upon themes taken up by Ernst Troeltsch, Max Weber

and other scholars in the period of reconstruction of European social thought

in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

BJÖRN WITTROCK 163

Hans Joas’ contributions in this eld extend and deepen an understanding of

the role of human agency in the constitution of societal institutions in their

historical contexts. They also highlight links between human action and ex-

periences of a transcendental nature. Thus we arrive at the core of what was

at stake, at the time of reconstruction of social thought, in debates a hundred

years ago about world religions and world history.

In his book, Die Macht des Heiligen. Eine Alternative zur Geschichte von der

Entzauberung [The Power of the Sacred: An Alternative to the Narrative of

Disenchantment], Hans Joas (2017) has chosen to focus on these themes and

to outline an alternative to Max Weber’s writings on disenchantment. The

enquiry into the uses and validity of the concept of disenchantment serves as

a pivot for a scholarly engagement that re-examines the history of the social

and human sciences, the role of contemporary social theory and the interwea

ving of sociology, theology and the history of religion. However, there is

an almost equally extensive and intensive engagement with the concepts of

secularization, rationalization and modernization. There is also a treatment

of a range of other concepts, not least those of differentiation, sacralization

and ritual.

In effect, Hans Joas outlines a conception of the sociology of religion that

draws on classic works by Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber but that also goes

beyond these works. In particular, Joas proposes a new interpretation of Max

Weber’s conception of a sociology of religion.

Hans Joas’ (2017) book also includes an extensive discussion of the concept

of the Axial Age. Thus new volume contains what is arguably the most cir

cumspect and thorough analysis to date of the history of the concept of the

Axial Age, including discussions of Ernst von Lasaulx, Abraham Hyacinthe

Anquetil-Duperron, John Stuart-Glennie, George Foot Moore and Rudolf

Otto, to name but some of the authors taken up by Joas.

I shall return to Hans

Joas analysis later in this essay. However, it might be noted already here that

he also refers to Weber’s footnote no 1 on page 155 in the second volume of

the Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion, with its remark about the

temporal simultaneity of the “rst blooming of Hellenic and Chinese phi-

losophers” and of the Israelite Prophetic Age. Weber, in contrast to Eduard

Meyer, rejects the idea of possible “loans” between these cultures (Weber, as

See also Guy G. Stroumsa (2018) “Anquetil Duperron et les origines de la philologie

orientale: l’orientalisme est un humanisme” in ASDIWAL. Revue genevoise d’anthropolo-

gie et d’histoire des religions, issue 13, pp. 161-174.

164 STUDIA POLITICÆ Nº 65 otoño 2025

cited in Joas, 2017).

In his essay “The Axial Age and Its Interpreters: Reopening a Debate”, ano

ther sociologist, Johann P. Arnason (2004), also discusses this footnote and

Weber’s interpretation of the Indian case relative to the “rst blooming of

Hellenic and Chinese philosophy”. His conclusion is that Weber has, in nuce,

formulated an Axial Age hypothesis. However, it would appear to be at least

as important for a discussion about the Axial Age to go beyond the footnote

and to view it in the context of Weber’s oeuvre. In such a context, the most

relevant question is that of the overall structure of the three volumes.

In the following, I shall argue that in the early history of social theory there

is an intimate relationship between the sociological study of world religions

and the historical analysis of civilizations and global historical change. This

relationship is at the core of Max Weber’s Collected Essays on the Sociology

of Religion. Furthermore, there is a distinct, but partially overlooked, scho-

larly tradition throughout the last century that has shared this focus.

I shall start by highlighting a few key contributions to this tradition starting

with works by Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch and ending with two recent

publications by Jürgen Habermas and Hans Joas. In this latter context, I sha

ll come back to Max Weber’s collected essays. In particular, I shall engage

with a text that is central to Hans Joas’ (2017) analysis in The Power of the

Sacred, namely Weber’s Zwischenbetrachtung, originally published towards

the end of the rst of the three volumes. In my essay, I shall maintain that

social theory and universal history were closely linked in the works of Weber

and Troeltsch. However, it is only towards the end of the twentieth century,

largely due to contributions by Robert N. Bellah and Shmuel N. Eisenstadt,

that these linkages have become clearly recognized again, if still only partia-

lly so, and have come to exert a formative inuence on our understanding of

the contemporary role of the social sciences.

1. Social Thought and the Study of World Religions

The period from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century was one in

which Europeans came into ever more frequent contact with the inhabitants

of other parts of the world and tried to understand, trade with and, increa-

See also Arnason (2003), Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical

Traditions (pp. 86-105, 157-179). Brill.

BJÖRN WITTROCK 165

singly, to dominate and subjugate peoples and territories in Africa, Asia and

the Americas. Out of such contacts, disciplines such as anthropology and

a variety of linguistic and ethnographic forms of knowledge emerged but

also new types of medicine. Gradually, in the second half of the eighteenth

century there was also a shift in the balance of economic, commercial and

political resources that tended to give increasing weight to European powers

relative to nations and societies in other parts of the world.

Similarly, there were signs that European cultural and scientic achieve-

ments were increasingly being incorporated into an imaginary in which Eu-

rope was presented as being no longer one among several civilizations but

as epitomizing the characteristics of civilization as such. This imaginary be-

came more prominent relative to an older conception that had depicted other

civilizations as different, but not inferior, and sometimes also superior in

some respects, as in the views among some Enlightenment thinkers of China

as being exemplary in the way in which wisdom and power were linked in

the conduct of public affairs.

It is only in the course of the nineteenth century, though, that ever larger

parts of the world became subjected to European territorial expansion and

acquisition on a massive scale and that it is possible to characterize the en

tire age as one of imperialism. In this period many European scholars and

observers took it for granted that a profound divide existed between their

own religious faith, most often varieties of Christianity, with a foundation

in religious experiences of divine revelation, and other forms of beliefs and

practices. Simultaneously, however, the nineteenth century also witnessed a

gradually growing interest among European theologians in extra-European

religions. In the early twentieth century this ushered in a debate about the

possibility of a sociology of religion and, indeed, about the scholarly study

of religion in general. This is a debate, however, that has to be seen in a wider

intellectual context.

Thus this was a period, which the intellectual historian H. Stuart Hughes

(1958) in a now classical overview, Consciousness and Society, described as

one in which an earlier condence in the universal applicability of a natura

listic and positivistic programme to all domains of scholarship, was waning

I have addressed some of these questions in various publications, including Johan Heil-

bron, Björn Wittrock and Lars Magnusson (Eds.). (2001): The Rise of the Social Sciences

and the Formation of Modernity: Conceptual Change in Context, 1750-1850. Originally

published in 1998 by Kluwer Academic Publishers.

166 STUDIA POLITICÆ Nº 65 otoño 2025

despite advances across a range of elds in the natural sciences. At the same

time a variety of programmes for the incipient social sciences were compe-

ting with each other.

It was also as a time when political and social contestations within countries

were becoming sharper, a time when deeper international scientic coope

ration occurred amidst an ever growing volume of international trade and

commerce at the same time as relationships between nations became sharper

and more closely tied to armaments. Religion, its study and its roles, was in

many ways at the crossroads of this variety of processes. At this juncture in

time, programmes were outlined for the systematic study of religion. Two

of these programmes came to be particularly seminal and exemplary for the

study of religion in its historical and societal contexts, namely the histori-

cal sociology of the Protestant theologian Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber’s

strongly historically orientated sociology of religion.

A sociology of religion in general and of world religions in particular has to

articulate a stance towards two sets of problems, namely the following ones:

First, on what grounds can a distinction be drawn between the so-called

world religions and other conglomerates of religious practices? Furthermore,

if such a dividing line can, indeed, be drawn, what then is the status of the

so-called world religions relative to each other and to sets of religious prac

tices of a more local or regional nature?

Second, is it possible to explain how and through which mechanisms world

religions inuence key societal practices and vice versa? In particular, what

is the interconnections between world religions and those wider patterns of

exchange, domination and interpretation that may be labelled civilizations?

Furthermore, are there features in some world religions that have been of key

signicance for the formation of a modern world and for its further efores

cence and radicalization? Is it, for instance, as Weber suggestively proposed,

possible to outline mechanisms through which the emergence and growth of

modern capitalism depends on a specic type of religious system of beliefs

and modes of conduct? Can we, as Weber more intimates than demonstrates,

discern tensions that emerge as a result of the unfolding of ever more radical

features inherent in both religious practices and other societal and cultural

practices?

Both Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber engage with these problems. They do

so in terms that differ in style, temperament, form of exposition, intensity of

narration and theoretical imaginary. Yet, both of them produce versions of

BJÖRN WITTROCK 167

answers to these two sets of basic problems for a sociology of religion that,

for all their differences, tend to be compatible, complementary and mutually

reinforcing.

However, from its inception in scholarly works and universities in Europe

and North America in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,

scholars engaging in any debate about history of religion as an academic

subject were confronted with an even more elementary question than the two

discerned about, namely the following one: should the dominant religion in

Europe and North America, i.e., Christianity, be assigned a special, privile

ged l position as a pre-eminently universalistic religion of revelation and sal-

vation. Such a stance could be asserted and perhaps even imposed. However,

in scholarly terms it required that two intellectual moves be made.

First, Christianity as a religion of revelation would have to be regarded as

categorically different from the forms of tribal and clan religions reported by

European explorers and administrators as they travelled across or conquered

ever larger extra-European areas of the Globe. Such a move entailed that

religious practices among inhabitants in the subtropical, tropical and subarc

tic zones, increasingly subjected to European rule, were assigned to elds

of study such as folklore and ethnography and kept separate from those of

theology and biblical and religious studies. In practice, most European and

North American scholars adhered to a delimitation roughly along these lines.

Second, another move had to be performed, namely one that ensured that a

distinction be made between Christianity and other forms of “higher” reli

gion that bore an appearance of being analogous to Christianity in structural,

semantic and even genealogical terms and, possibly, constituting religions of

revelation.

In order to perform this second move, some scholars, notably the Leiden

Old Testament scholar Abraham Kuenen (1883), argued that a distinction

be made between truly universal religions and religions that in fundamen

tal ways were rather exponents of various ethnic or national properties. The

upshot of this analytical apparatus was that, despite apparent similarities be-

tween Christianity and other religions with a vast extension, elaborate rituals

and with theologies inscribed in books that had been assigned sacred status,

it was in the end only Christianity that might be labelled a truly universal

religion rather than merely being a cultural and theological expression of a

particular nation, people or a similarly delimited collective.

168 STUDIA POLITICÆ Nº 65 otoño 2025

2. On the Possibility of a Sociology of World Religions: Ernst Troeltsch

and Max Weber

Already at the turn of the nineteenth century an assumption about the su

periority in terms of universalism of Christianity relative to other world

religions was becoming, even though still being widely held, increasingly

problematic. This problematic position is reected in the programmes for a

sociology of religion elaborated by Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber.

In the German academic world, a group, mainly of theologians, emerged and

gained strength within the framework of the so-called religious-historical

school. It had taken shape in the 1880s and 1890s at several German univer

sities, including Göttingen, Tübingen, Marburg, Leipzig and Bonn. Its mem-

bers argued for a strengthening of the study of the history of extra-European

religions also within theological faculties of universities. Ernst Troeltsch

was a key member of this intellectual circle. The group met with sympathies

in several circles.

However, as late as in 1901, Adolf von Harnack, like Troeltsch a Protestant

liberal theologian and church historian but of an older generation, resisted the

idea that faculties of theology should create Chairs in the history of religion

in terms that reveal a deep emotional aversion to the idea of such Chairs and

of studying the history of Christianity and of other religions on equal terms.

Harnack was not alone in holding such views but his reputation and position

in the German academe was exceptional and he played a prominent role in

academic and public life in general. He was also some years later, namely

in 1911, to become the rst President of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft

(KWG), the precursor of today’s Max Planck Society (MPG), at the time so

metimes ironically described as the Emperor’s academic guards regiment.

Hence, when Troeltsch and Weber addressed the theme of the possibility of

a scientic study not only in the form of church history but as a history that

treated Christian religion as one among several world religions, this was a

theme of interest to many intellectuals but within theological faculties and

For an interesting review of some of these developments, see Suzanne L. Marchand

(2009), German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship. Cam-

bridge University Press, not least 252-284. See also „Nachwort des Herausgebers, 1. Das

Interesse an den Weltreligionen am Vorabend des Ersten Welkrieges and das Problem der

Wirtschaftsethik“, in Max Weber (1991), Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen: Konfzi-

anismus und Taoismus. Schriften 1915-1920 (pp. 235-241). Published by Mohr Siebeck.

BJÖRN WITTROCK 169

also beyond it was still an unorthodox stance and to some even a scandalous

proposition.

In the present context it is only possible to indicate Ernst Troeltsch’s (1924)

stance in some of its outlines by way of pointing to a small posthumous co

llection of ve lectures, which he had been invited in 1920 to deliver in Lon-

don, Oxford and Edinburgh, Der Historismus und seine Überwindung: Fünf

Vorträge von Ernst Troeltsch. The lecture, rst delivered in Oxford, on “Die

Stellung des Christentums unter den Weltreligionen”, is particularly fascina-

ting (pp. 62-83). It contains a strong plea not only for contacts and dialogue

between representatives of different world religions. There is also a vision of

the elaboration through such contacts of a quest for a deeper understanding

of questions of human dignity as they appear from within given traditions,

each with its tacit presuppositions and its place within a certain cultural and

societal context. Troeltsch articulates a vision that the end result of such

communicative interaction might be something much more signicant than

a vague generalization of values. Rather Troeltsch holds out the possibility

for the emergence of, to use Hans Joas’ vocabulary, a new conception of the

sacredness of the person, out of the particular conceptions of different forms

of universalism inherent in different world religions.

For Troeltsch this dialogical quest was advocated on the basis of an autobio

graphical account of the intellectual development of his own views. Thus he

tells how his own research gradually led him to a realization that Christia-

nity as a religion with universalistic claims was nevertheless fundamentally

shaped and permeated by the historical experiences of the areas in which

it had taken root and grown over centuries in an originally pagan Europe

(Troeltsch, 1924, pp. 74-83).

However, this sense of a common ground did not extend to forms of Chris

tianity beyond the cultural sphere in which the merger of Latin-Romance

and Germanic peoples had taken place. Thus adherents of Eastern forms

of Christianity, such Jacobites, Nestorians, Armenians, and even the Rus-

sian Orthodox Church, fall outside of this image of Christian universalism,

Troeltsch (1924) maintained, since they had emerged out of a different set of

historical experiences and beliefs (pp. 75-76).

With an even more extended perspective, it had to be admitted, Troeltsch

emphasized, that a naïve belief in something Absolute may be just as genui

ne a feature in non-Christian religions as among Western Christians, once it

was admitted that different historical, geographical and social conditions and

contingencies had given rise to beliefs that were genuine but inevitably had

170 STUDIA POLITICÆ Nº 65 otoño 2025

a different appearance from those common in Christians belonging to one of

the churches having their origins, if in the form of adherence or opposition,

in some version of Latin Christendom.

In other words, there is, Troeltsch argues, in all the “great and spiritual re

ligions”, a sense of “the Absolute”. However, this sense takes shape in in-

timate interaction with the entire cultural system of which it has become

an integral part. A sense of the Absolute, which goes beyond the contextual

limitations inherent in a religion, may only emerge as the result of a dialogue

and a quest which is a common to all these religions and which may usher in

a common objective that is as yet unknown.

In summary, Troeltsch adopts a position, shared by Weber, according to

which world religions are regarded as analogous in categorical terms and

may be taken up in scholarly works from both a theological and a sociologi

cal vantage point. However, in contrast to Troeltsch, Weber came to develop

a programme for the comparative study world religions but also of the cultu-

ral worlds, i.e. the civilizations, of which these religions formed a signicant

part at least in genealogical terms. The most extensive scholarly work, which

prepared for publication by Max Weber himself, even if not fully completed

in the form he had envisaged, are the three volumes, more than 1400 pages of

text, of the Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie [Collected Essays

on The Sociology of Religion]. In the form in which they were published

after Weber’s death, they constitute a historical and comparative analysis of

the early history of the great world religions.

Furthermore, while the point of departure for Weber’s project is the objective

to formulate and examine an argument about the causes of a specic form of

capitalism in the modern world, a major share of the pages of the three volu

mes have, as already noted, a focus on the transformations that occurred in

the period which many, if not most, historians of world religions, have come

to label the Axial Age.

This is true for almost all of the third volume on Ancient Judaism and for

most of the second volume on Hinduism and Buddhism. As for the rst vo

lume, it has, as already indicated, a complex structure with more than 20%

of the 573 pages devoted to four introductory, intermediary and concluding

sections, each one with its one tone and emphasis. The remainder is rather

equally divided between the two essays on Protestantism and one long sec-

tion on Confucianism and Daoism, and the latter section has to a signicant

extent a focus on the Axial Age.

BJÖRN WITTROCK 171

Against this background, it might be suggested, that Weber’s collected essa-

ys on the sociology of the world religions constitute the largest sociological

oeuvre on the Axial Age to be published before the late twentieth century

projects of Shmuel N. Eisenstadt together with Wolfgang Schluchter and of

Robert N. Bellah. The possible exceptions to the validity of this assessment

might perhaps be some of the works by, or inspired by, Benjamin Schwarz.

Needless to say, nothing of this detracts from the fact that it was Karl Jasper’s

(1953) book The Origin and Goal of History that introduced the term Axial

Age even if its empirical part is just an interesting outline.

If this analysis, at least tentatively, is accepted, it entails that it is meaningful

in terms of analytical categories to relate different Axial world religions to

each other and to explore similarities and differences between them. It is pre

cisely such an exercise that Max Weber undertakes in his Collected Essays

on the Sociology of Religion.

In an analogous vein, Troeltsch also opens up for such an analysis in his

essay on the position of Christianity relative to other world religions. This

indicates the structure of a reasonable answer to the rst analytical question

posed above about the nature of a demarcation of world religions relative to

other types of ritualistic and religious practices. The delineation of the great

world religions is not merely conventional. It reects the status of historical

scholarship on some of the major transformations in societal practices that

occurred in the centuries around the middle of the rst millennium BCE.

Both Weber and Troetlsch draw on such scholarship and structure their basic

arguments accordingly.

Several later scholars have come to describe these transformations with ex

plicit reference to Karl Jasper’s terminology as constituting an Axial Age.

However, what in the last instance is of signicance is not whether a par-

ticular terminology is employed to describe some of these transformations

but whether the transformations themselves are identied and assessed in

terms of their causes and consequences (as Weber has an ambition to do in

his essays). In Weber’s case this is an explicit ambition, in Troeltsch’s case it

is only implicitly so, but both arguments are cast in terms that are consistent

with each other and follow paths that are to some extent parallel and to some

extent complementary.

Some years after Max Weber’s essays on the Protestant ethic and the Protestant sects

were published for the rst time, his friend Ernst Troeltsch (1923) undertook an extremely

careful analysis of the emergence of and divergence between Lutheran and Calvinist forms

172 STUDIA POLITICÆ Nº 65 otoño 2025

However, the change of terminology is not merely a matter of convention.

It also has consequences for the substance and orientation of an analysis of

religions and civilizations. In Hans Joas’ (2017) words, the shift from a dis-

course about religions of salvation and redemption to that of an Axial Age

entails a sharpening of the focus of scholarly debates (p. 290-291). In the

next section, I shall outline the conditions and implications of this shift with

reference to the contributions of Robert N. Bellah and Shmuel N. Eisenstadt.

I shall then discuss two recent major publications, written by Jürgen Haber-

mas and Hans Joas respectively.

In another context, I have highlighted conceptual developments in the middle

of the twentieth century of the legacy of Weber’s account of the transforma

tive period that formed the focus of Weber’s Collected Essays on the Socio-

logy of Religion and that Weber’s disciple and colleague Karl Jaspers came

to denote by the term the “Axial Age”. The key protagonists in my analysis

of this period are Karl Jaspers and an American scholar who had been inte-

racting with members of the Weber circle in Heidelberg in the 1920s, inclu-

ding Jaspers, namely Talcott Parsons. In a slender book, published in 1966,

with the title Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives, Parsons

formulated, without mentioning Jaspers, an alternative narrative to that of

Jaspers’ (1953) account in The Origin and Goal of History.

Societies was published at a time when Parsons’ inuence in social science in

general and in sociology in particular may have been at its Zenith. Its appea

rance may be seen against the background both of wider contextual shifts

and intellectual challenges inherent in the Parsonian scheme. Interestingly

enough, just a few years before its publication, Parsons had been teaching a

course at Harvard together with both Robert Bellah and Shmuel Eisentadt.

of Protestantism in his magnum opus Die Soziallehren der cristlichen Kirchen und Grup-

pen (pp. 605-794). See in particular section 3, “Der Calvinismus”. Even if Troeltsch was a

theologian, his writing is sociological and underpinnes by a keen historical sense. The Prot-

estantism part of his book takes up more than half of the nearly 1000 pages of the volume

and the rst section has the characteristic title “Das soziologische Problem des Protestant-

ismus”. What Troeltsch writes is compatible with the thrust of Weber’s analysis but formed

by a deep and detailed understanding of every stage in the early history of Protestantism.

For an understanding of Weber’s (1991) interest in China, the Studienausgabe to the vol-

ume of the collected works of Max Weber, Band I/19, provides interesting materials about

the context in which Weber was writing and revising his study of the ethics of economy

of the world religions as well as of its reception. See Max Weber, Die Wirtschaftsethik der

Weltreligionen. Konfuzianismus und Taoismus, Schriften 1915-1920, Studienausgabe der

Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, Band I/19.

BJÖRN WITTROCK 173

In later decades of the twentieth century and in the beginning of the twen-

ty-rst century, the writings of these two scholars were instrumental in re-

invigorating an interest in exploring links between a comparative sociology

and history of religions and civilizations and efforts to understand the mo-

dern world and its antinomies. These concerns gradually came to attract the

attention of a range of scholars in the humanities and social sciences and

also contributed to a redenition of the nature and commitments of social

theory.

3. The Idea of the Axial Age and the Study of World Religions and World

History: Robert Neelly Bellah and Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt

It would not be Parsons’ sociology, however, that would engender a renewed

interest in Weber’s and Jaspers’ works on the long-term history of world

religions and civilizations. Instead, the rst strong impetus in this direction

would come in 1975 from another Harvard professor, namely the sinolo-

gist Benjamin Schwartz and a group of prominent scholars, including Peter

Brown, Louis Dumont, Eric Weil, and Arnaldo Momigliano. They took up

the notion of the Axial Age in a path-breaking special issue of the journal

Daedalus, devoted to the theme “Wisdom, Revelation, and Doubt: Perspec-

tives on the rst Millennium B.C.”.

Several of them later published major

works that further explored these ideas.

Soon afterwards the two young colleagues of Parsons, already mentioned,

namely Robert Bellah and Shmuel Eisenstadt (2005) embarked on research

programmes that came to retain their commitment and engagement for the

rest of their lives. These two scholars are rightly said to have “done more

than anyone to make the Axial Age signicant for comparative historical

sociology”.

There is an obvious parallelism between the research programmes of Bellah

and Eisenstadt and that of Max Weber’s Collected Essays on the Sociology

of Religion.

Daedalus 104, Spring 1975, no. 2.

The quotation is from an article where he generously acknowledges the signicance of

Shmuel Eisenstadt’s contribution, a recognition that any fair observer should extend to

include Bellah himself. See Robert N. Bellah (2005), “What is Axial about the Axial Age?”

in European Journal of Sociology 46 (pp. 69-89).

174 STUDIA POLITICÆ Nº 65 otoño 2025

In fact, Shmuel Eisenstadt’s project in the 1980s and 1990s, in cooperation

with Wolfgang Schluchter, on the Axial Age and the great world religions

had Weber’s collected essays as a key reference point.

This project, which

I came to join in 1991, was inspired by a vision of probing the continued

validity —and the need for a possible rethinking— of Weber’s analysis in his

Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion.

As to the substantive core of Axial thought, Jaspers and, even more so, later

interpreters such as Bellah and Eisenstadt and their collaborators and collea

gues have recognized the complexity and sophistication of the long history

of narrative accounts in the form of myths and of rituals associated with such

myths but also the multiple forms of Axial thought.

It is largely due to the dual commitment of both Eisenstadt and Bellah to

focus both on detailed empirical scholarship and on theorizing opening wide

theoretical perspectives that the idea of the Axial Age in later years has come

to enter centre-stage in social science debates and theorizing.

Bellah and Eisenstadt represent different intellectual styles, but both of them

have been crucial in transmitting to the scholarly community at large a strong

sense of the intellectual urgency of the debates around the idea of the Axial

Age. This idea has been the subject of an increasingly intense but also in

creasingly well-informed debate, involving ancient historians, historians of

religion and philosophy, and linguists.

Scholars not only in the humanities and social sciences but also in elds such

as cognitive science have explore ideas of the Axial Age. Most notably per

See Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (Ed.) The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (1986).

University of New York Press; Kulturen der Achsenzeit I: Ihre Ursprünge und ihre Vielfalt,

Teil 1, Griechenland, Israel, Mesopotamien. Teil 2: Spätantike, Indien, China, Islam (1987);

Kulturen der Achsenzeit II: Ihre institutionelle und kulturelle Dynamik, Teil 1: China, Ja-

pan. Teil 2: Indien. Teil 3: Buddhismus, Islam, Altägypten, westliche Kultur (1992). See also

Wolfgang Schluchter (1996), Paradoxes of Modernity: Culture and Conduct in the Theory

of Max Weber. Stanford University Press. See also Wolfgang Schluchter (1998), Die Entste-

hung des modernen Rationalismus: Eine Analyse von Max Webers Entwicklungsgeschichte

des Okzidents. Suhrkamp. Wolfgang Schluchter und Friedrich Wilhelm Graf (Hrsg.) (2005),

Asketischer Protestantismus und der ‚Geist‘ des modernen Kapitalismus. Moor Siebeck, as

well as Johann P. Arnason, Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt and Björn Wittrock (Eds.) (2005), Axial

Civilizations and World History. Brill, and Robert N. Bellah (2005), “What is Axial about

the Axial Age?”, European Journal of Sociology 46, 69-89 as well as Robert N. Bellah’s

(2010) magisterial works in this eld in recent years are his monograph Religion in Human

Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age and his and Hans Joas already mentioned

co-edited volume from 2012, The Axial Age and Its Consequences.

BJÖRN WITTROCK 175

haps a range of theoretically orientated scholars such as Johann P. Arnason,

José Casanova, Merlin Donald, Jürgen Habermas, Hans Joas, Charles Taylor

and Roberto Mangabeira Unger have come to deeply engage in the dialogue

about transformative moments in world religions and world history.

As a result, this theme in general and that of the Axial Age in particular has

emerged as one of the great scholarly discussions of the late twentieth and

early twenty-rst century.

4. World Religions and the Evolution of Human Culture: Robert Neelly

Bellah

In his late magnum opus Religion as Human Evolution: From the Paleoli

thic to the Axial Age as well as in the parallel volume, edited together with

Hans Joas, The Axial Age and Its Consequences, Robert Bellah (2011, 2012)

explores in detail the different paths that led up to Axial breakthroughs in

different cultural parts of the Old World, namely in Ancient Greece, Ancient

Israel, and Ancient China, and plausibly also in the case of India. (As for

Iran, Bellah refrains, with reference to the paucity and uncertainty of sour-

ce materials, from analysing this fth “classical” case of an original Axial

transformation).

In Bellah’s (2011, 2012) account the Axial Age heralds the emergence of a

new cultural stage in human evolution, namely that of so-called theoretic

culture. In this characterization, Bellah is inspired by the evolutionary and

cognitive perspective of Merlin Donald (1991, p. 214). Bellah emphasizes

that the Axial Age is expressive of the possibilities that opened up to hu

mankind at the time of the emergence of a fourth evolutionary stage in the

development of human culture.

Thus from the earliest forms of human interaction in so-called episodic cul

ture, over mimetic culture and, the development of language and the pos-

sibility of constructing “a unied, collectively held system of explanatory

and regulatory metaphors,” a “comprehensive modeling of the entire human

universe” (Donald, 1991, p. 214) made so-called mythic culture possible.

In this evolutionary scheme the Axial Age represents a relatively early phase

of the fourth fundamental stage, the so-called theoretic age that allows for a

One example of the relevance of the Axial Age for efforts to reach an understanding of our

contemporary age is Charles Taylor’s magisterial work A Secular Age (2007).

176 STUDIA POLITICÆ Nº 65 otoño 2025

new type of critically reexive activities. These activities complement those

of bodily reactions and mimetic imitation and gesturing, and those of mythi-

cal narratives. Bellah also argues that this perspective serves as a means

towards avoiding teleological reasoning. This is a convincing argument as

far as the four, or possibly ve, original cases of Axial breakthroughs are

concerned.

In this perspective there is no need to privilege any one of the ve cases as

being the precursor. Nor is there a need to construe a genealogy and to es

tablish streams of inuence and of borrowing. However, it seems less clear

how an evolutionary perspective can help explain developments once the

original Axial qualitative changes have taken place.

Jaspers had argued that a distinctive feature of the Axial Age was the emer

gence of forms of thought that did not only involve transpositions and va-

riations of mythical narratives but new forms of thinking that clearly trans-

cended the limits of existing practices of human society. This feature gures

prominently as a key characteristic in the analyses of many scholars, inclu-

ding Shmuel Eisenstadt and Hans Joas but also in the works of Robert Bellah.

Bellah, however, also tries to construe the preconditions for the possibility

of expressing a distinction between a transcendental and a mundane sphere.

One element in this line of argument is to emphasize that the Axial Age invol

ved the emergence of a distinction between narrative and analytical accounts.

Thereby humans are not only able give expression to visions and ideas of the

world beyond the constraints of existence at a specic time and place. The

distinction also enables a critical and analytically orientated stance towards

both material and intellectual practices and beliefs. Already for Jaspers this

marked the transition from mythos to logos, a breakthrough in critical reec-

tion and indeed the emergence of history in the sense of the epoch in human

existence characterized by a reexive, historical consciousness.

Bellah also devotes much attention to the question of the form of religious

practices in two main types of pre-Axial societies, namely tribal societies

and large so-called Archaic societies. Thus in earlier tribal societies, the in

vocation and articulation of mythical beliefs in ritualistic practices would

normally serve the social and cultural coherence of a collective. They would,

of course, involve practices outside of the bounds of day-to-day practices of

production and reproduction. They might also involve or usher in changes in

the collective life of a community. In this way, myths could be reinterpreted

and supplanted or even replaced by additional myths, as could imaginations

BJÖRN WITTROCK 177

about the primacy of different forces or divinities associated with the diffe-

rent forms of myths.

In large-scale Archaic societies with rituals performed by Emperors or other

centrally placed rulers, occasional and irregular, but inevitable, catastrophic

external events, involving e.g. draughts, famines, pandemics and ooding,

might lead to questioning and reinterpretations but rarely, if ever, to a funda

mental challenge to notions of an ideal cosmological or societal order.

In other words, in both types of pre-Axial societies, there might be, Bellah

argues, instances of disruption but rarely ushering in more than a partial

adaptation and not in a critical reection and rejection of some myth by way

of questioning its premises or engaging in a comparative exposition of its

merits and shortcomings in, say, a Platonic or Aristotelian, dialogical form.

This started only in some societies in the Old World around the middle of the

rst millennium BCE. This change is profound enough to justify the desig

nation Axial Age and the identication of those civilizations where this rst

occurred.

In many ways, Bellah’s argument is similar to Jaspers’. However, it is less

philosophical and involves an incomparably more extensive and careful

reconstruction of historical scholarship. It is also, contrary to Jaspers’ and

Eisenstadt’s inquiries, grounded in —the expression inspired by seems too

weak— an evolutionary perspective represented, as already mentioned, not

least by the works of Merlin Donald. Interestingly enough, this link between

evolutionary theorizing and psychology has also come to exert an inuence

on discussions in the eld of cognitive science.

Bellah’s project on religion in human evolution was meant to be carried on

beyond the original Axial Age. Alas, Robert Bellah’s death in July 2013

meant that this project has not been nalized. Whether manuscripts covering

later periods exist and may come to be published remains an open question.

5. Comparative Civilizations and the Antinomies of World History: Sh-

muel Noah Eisenstadt

Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt has sometimes been described as the Max Weber

of our times. At least for a time, and in particular in the 1960s, he was often

perceived as a representative of the structural-functionalist school that came

to occupy a dominant position in much of social science.

178 STUDIA POLITICÆ Nº 65 otoño 2025

Eisenstadt’s early studies involved a focus on the study of cultural and reli-

gious practices and traditions. Already in these early works there was also

one important feature that came to pervade virtually all of Eisenstadt’s wor-

ks, namely an emphasis on antinomies, inherent tensions and processes that

have opposing consequences and on a dialogical view of human action and

of society.

In 1963, and as already mentioned, his early magnum opus appeared, namely

The Political System of Empires. This book made him famous throughout the

scholarly world of social science. It analysed structural features and contes

tations, which appeared in imperial societies, over the control and use of free

resources in societies where a large share of all resources were bound up in

traditional and ascriptitve settings beyond the control of a central imperial

apparatus and its rulership and taxation. Different empires develop different

strategies to enable control of free resources but also different strategies in

their use of a variety of military or cultural projects, dependent on different

civilizational imaginations and visions.

The new direction of the research programme of Eisenstadt gradually took

form during the second half of the 1970s and the rst half of the 1980s. These

were years when there occurred what might perhaps best be termed a redis

covery of both Max Weber’s Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion

and of Karl Jasper’s (1953) book Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte.

For Eisenstadt (1963), the hypothesis of the Axial Age held out a triple pro

mise. Firstly, it might broaden and complement the institutional analysis of

the political systems of empires. Secondly, it might provide, or at least su-

ggest, an understanding of the emergence in some societies, as well as the

non-emergence in others, of distinctly imperial political forms of rulership

in some parts of the world at a, broadly speaking, similar period in time. It

might, however also and thirdly, provide an analytical account that would

be less constricted by the somewhat rigid taxonomic categories of structural

functional analysis of Parsons.

Together with a prominent Weberian scholar, Wolfgang Schluchter, Eisens

tadt made the idea of the Axial Age focus of a sustained research program-

me. Eisenstadt extended the analysis considerably and involved humanistic

scholars in elds such as Egyptology, Assyriology, Sanskrit studies, History

of Religion, Sinology, and many others with an interest in an overall analysis

of societies and cultures in their historical contexts and in exploring linkages

between history, philosophy and religion across regions and across time.

BJÖRN WITTROCK 179

The idea of the Axial Age suggested a research focus that was related to

Eisenstadt’s earlier works and to his interests in Weber’s sociology. It also

provided an analytical framework that gave prominence both to institutional

and cultural phenomena. Furthermore, it went beyond a North Atlantic pers-

pective, given that the key sites of the Axial breakthroughs were located in

the Eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East and in South and East Asia. In

a sense it was a form of analysis that had afnities with a cultural and inte-

llectual cosmopolitanism that recognized the achievements of different sites

across the world.

Eisenstadt published a large number of monographs, edited volumes and ar

ticles in the 1980s and 1990s on the idea of the Axial Age. A succinct pre-

sentation of the early part of his project together with Wolfgang Schluchter

is given in the edited volume The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civili-

zations (Eisenstadt, 1986).

Eisenstadt’s interest in the Axial Age was never that of an antiquarian. Ra

ther it reected his sense that the momentous upheavals of the Axial Age

provided an echo for the most deeply transformative events of our own age

as well. There is a deep connectivity between his interests in antiquity and in

modernity. In both areas, his original Buberian inuences became gradually

more pronounced and both his theorizing and scholarly style came to differ

ever more from those of his former colleague Talcott Parsons.

More precisely, for Eisenstadt, modernity was never mainly the successful

end-result of a process of differentiation and modernization. Even if those

elements are relevant, modernity for him is rather a situation characterized

by a lack of markers of certainty. As such it entails great potentials but also

great threats of the use of violence.

In practical terms, Eisenstadt elaborated the ideas of multiple modernities in

Jerusalem from the early 1990’s but also, in the context of a joint research

programme with Wolfgang Schluchter (at Heidelberg and Erfurt) and myself

(in Uppsala). Some of these ideas involved exploring societal transforma

tions in the course of the second millennium CE, what was sometimes called

“early modernities” or, to use a term coined, by the Sanskrit scholar Sheldon

Pollock, the “vernacular millennium”. In this context, Shmuel Eisenstadt

and some of his colleagues elaborated what became an alternative to both

classical modernization theory and to ideas about an inevitable clash of civi-

lizations, namely the paradigm of so-called multiple modernities.

180 STUDIA POLITICÆ Nº 65 otoño 2025

In many ways, the age of modernity was for Eisenstadt an age of pervasive

institutional and cultural transformation of a signicance equal to that of the

Axial Age. In fact, he sometimes described it as a second Axial Age, i.e., an

age in which new notions of temporality, the construction of social bonds,

and of cosmology ushered in institutional transformations previously unima-

ginable. However, in this respect modernity represented an intensication of

features of the Axial Age to such an extent that it threatened to undermine its

own conditions.

Moreover, and more systematically than perhaps any other social scientist, Ei

senstadt argued against the identication of modernity solely with a Western

tradition. Even if the contemporary world is one characterized by a belief in

the potential of human action to change social and political conditions, there

are many different sets of such beliefs and many different institutional paths.

In works on India, China, Japan — in particular the great study of Japanese

Civilization: A Comparative View and on Islamic societies, Eisenstadt was

able to demonstrate that these societies in fact exhibited both cultural and ins-

titutional features, typical of modern societies, at a much earlier stage and in

much more widespread form, than scholars had assumed (Eisenstadt, 1996).

In works such as Fundamentalism, Sectarianism and Revolutions he con

sistently argued that fundamentalism is not a traditional but a distinctly

modern phenomenon (Eisenstadt, 1999). Specically, it is modern not only

by the fact that its adherents tend to use modern technologies to the limits

of their capacity. It is also profoundly anti-traditional in its rejection of

practices of continuous textual contestation and reinterpretation. Instead of

such practices the different varieties of fundamentalism assert the absolute

and unchangeable validity of their own decontextualized interpretation of

textual passages in those scriptures about sociality, cosmology and tem-

porality that they elevate to an ontological status of self-referential and

eternal validity.

In practice this tends to entail a social and political stance characterized by

efforts to violently impose upon society at large a combination of political

voluntarism, institutional enforcement, technological pragmatism and inte

llectual curtailment and inexibility. In other words, it means the emergence

of cultural and institutional practices that are completely at odds with those

of traditional institutions, be they classical empires, traditional religious or-

ders or the legal and political organs of pre-industrial societies.

In parallel to his interests in the contemporary age, he extended and dee

pened his engagement with research on the Axial Age. In dialogue with a

BJÖRN WITTROCK 181

variety of historical experts he explored the emergence of axial forms of

cultural and institutional phenomena in the rst millennium BCE. Perhaps

the most extensive demonstration of this from later years of his career is the

volume Axial Civilizations and World History, edited together with Johann P.

Arnason and Björn Wittrock (Eisenstadt et al., 2005).

In these historical contexts, Eisenstadt always pressed for a close inquiry into

precisely those cases that might constitute the strongest and most convincing

counter-instances to the hypothesis of the emergence of the Axial Age in

those civilizations that had been highlighted by Jaspers, Bellah and Eisens

tadt himself. In the volume just mentioned those instance were the ones of

Pharaonic Egypt and of Mesopotamia. The authors of these chapters, Jan

Assmann and Piotr Michalowski, explored them in depth as possible exam-

ples of Axial-analogous breakthroughs prior to the Axial Age proper — but

came out strengthening rather than weakening the original hypothesis about

the location of the Axial breakthroughs.

Furthermore, Eisenstadt argued that many previous forms of ritualistic prac

tice were, if in a different guise, continued in religious practices after the

Axial breakthroughs and thereby contributed to the tensions and antinomies

inherent in all highly articulated civilizations. In the core epoch of the Axial

transformation, the fact that the most important proponents of the transfor-

mations had a peripheral and heterodox position vis-à-vis mainstream cul-

tural and political order led to an opening of horizons and the emergence of

a variety of critical voices. Eventually, however, the Axial ruptures were, in

Eisenstadt’s view, given a standardized form and became more or less clo-

sely tied to new political centres and to new cultural-religious orthodoxies.

However, they still retained a potential for the emergence of new heterodox

interpretations that might take the form of a serious threat to central political

power, no matter how closely linked the clerical and religious interpreters

had become to that centre.

This served as yet one more source of inspiration for Eisenstadt’s fascination

with possible parallels between the ruptures in some civilizations in antiquity

and the revolutionary transformations of the modern age. It is not co-inci

dental that while working on the large volume about the Axial Age, he also

wrote a monograph with the title The Great Revolutions and the Civilizations

of Modernity (Eisenstadt, 2006). In both periods there is a crisis in terms of

the, at least temporary, absence of markers of certainty. In both there is also

an emphasis on the role of human agency to shape mundane reality so as to

better conform to a visionary imaginations of human amelioration.

182 STUDIA POLITICÆ Nº 65 otoño 2025

This emphasis on parallels between transformative sequences of events had

important epistemic consequences. It meant that Eisenstadt, while fascina-

ted with the ruptures both in the middle of the rst millennium BCE and

in the middle of the rst millennium CE (with the rise of Christendom and

later Islam) as well at the end of the second millennium CE (with the Great

Revolutions of Modernity) needed analytical categories capable of grasping

similarities and differences between transformations in distant and different

historical landscapes.

Two strategies immediately presented themselves. Occasionally, Eisensta

dt tended to deal with this problem in terms of temporal notions. Thus one

possibility was to recognize the similarity of later developments to those

that had occurred in the middle of the rst millennium by describing later

developments, e.g. the emergence of Islam, as constituting a “secondary”

breakthrough. This might appear as a convenient stratagem. However, with

an increasing distance in time and space, the case for suggesting a reasona-

ble genealogy tends to become weaker. As a consequence, Eisestadt became

increasingly hesitant to use such a terminology.

An alternative stance might be to distinguish between the temporal notion

of an Axial Age and an analytical one of Axial civilizations or features cha

racteristic of Axiality. This was an epistemic stance that was reected in Ei-

senstadt’s (1996) famous book about Japan as an example of a modern but

non-Axial civilization.

Even though possible, this is perhaps not always an analytically satisfactory

solution. An alternative way to proceed might be to recognize that at the core

of both Jasper’s, Bellah’s and Eisenstadt’s analyses, there is an assumption

that human beings, once they have acquired access to the means to record

and store their memories and have recognized their capacity to change states

of affairs in the world, cannot avoid the possibility of reecting on their own

existence relative to the passage of time, to their relationship to others, to

their own nite existence and to their potential to intervene into the world.

These dimensions of human existence may however be given vastly different

interpretations in different contexts and some of which may enable, others

obfuscate, different types of institutional practices.

Major institutional restructurings will tend to occur in conjunction with the

articulation of different positions along such dimensions and, if deep-seated

enough, to constitute something of a cultural crystallization that may create

path of developments of some endurance. In this perspective both the origi

BJÖRN WITTROCK 183

nal transformations of the Axial Age and those of the modern era —and, for

that matter, those that occurred in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries at the

Western and Eastern seaboards of the Old World— constitute such periods

of cultural crystallization.

Furthermore, in recent decades, historical social science seems to have arri

ved at a set of relatively well-documented hypotheses about conditions for

the occurrence of such crystallizations. In other contexts, I have, to some

extent also inspired by the conceptual historical work of Reinhart Koselleck,

tried to demonstrate the fruitfulness of such an approach.

Shmuel Eisenstadt, perhaps more than any contemporary scholar, explored

these types of conditions for deep-seated change in human societies. In par

ticular, few scholars of equal prominence in his generation maintained such

a keen interest in the great variety of societies and cultures across time and

space. These interests were not subsiding but became greater with the pas-

sage of time. Eisenstadt became ever more deeply engaged with the study

of the world beyond the Atlantic seaboard. This engagement was also re-

ected in a dialogical form of curiosity-driven research which ensured him

of friends, readers and colleagues far outside of the areas along the North

Atlantic were most historical social science at that time was being pursued.

It is difcult to imagine a scholar more driven by intellectual curiosity than

Eisenstadt. nor anyone more interested in exploring the antinomies of human

life and more prepared to expose his own favourite ideas to being probed in

dialogue with others.

6. Contemporary Crossroads: Jürgen Habermas and Hans Joas

At the beginning of the twenty-rst century it became increasingly evident

that questions about the history and future of humankind could not be limited

to accounts of the achievements of a relatively small number of North Atlan-

tic societies in the course of the last two or three centuries. Shmuel Eisensta-

dt’s proposal that the implications of a notion of multiple modernities be spelt

out and that ancient history might prot from exploring the hypothesis of an

Axial breakthrough in human self-reectivity, emerging at different global

locations, reected such concerns. So did also calls for a renewed reection

on the nature of grounded knowledge vis-à-vis different forms of Faith and

religious belief and about the possibilities of human beings to use reason and

creativity to overcome societal constraints and impositions. Towards the

end of the second decade of the century, two prominent sociologists, namely

184 STUDIA POLITICÆ Nº 65 otoño 2025

Jürgen Habermas and Hans Joas, have each written a magnum opus that ad-

dresses these themes from a vantage point in which an analysis of Axial Age

is of constitutive signicance.

6.1. Jürgen Habermas and the Occidental Genealogy of Reason and Li

berty

In his late magnum opus, This Too a History of Philosophy, to quote the title

of the —at the time of my writing this essay not yet published— English

translation, Jürgen Habermas (2019) explores the complex and rich genealo

gy of a philosophical and ethical tradition that embraces efforts to establish

and to articulate a conception of philosophy entailing the closest possible

link between notions of reason and liberty.

This involves tracing a genealogy that takes its starting point in the pe-

riod of the Axial Age. In fact, the idea of the Axial Age is introduced by

Habermas (2019) already in the preface to the rst of the two volumes,

the one with a focus on Die okzidentale Konstellation von Glauben und

Wissen [The Occidental Constellation of Faith and Knowledge], and is

then pursued throughout this volume, being the main theme of the analy-

sis for some 300 pages, as well as recurring in many instances also in the

following volume, Vernünftige Freiheit. Spuren des Diskurses über Glau-

ben und Wissen [Rational Liberty. Traces of the Discourse on Faith and

Knowledge].

In this analysis, Habermas is elaborating an account that in

many ways is situated in close proximity to Weber’s account of the ethics

of world religions.

In both volumes of Habermas’ oeuvre there is a sustained engagement with

the relationship between an “occidental constellation” and the gradual emer-

gence of a political philosophy with a focus on exploring inextricable links

between notions of reason and liberty. However, Habermas analysis also

takes up ideas of some social theorists, including John Meyer and Johann P.

Arnason, about properties of a world society or of a global, if diverse, mo-

dernity constituting a form of civilization sui generis. Thus while Habermas

I write this at a time when the English translation has not yet been published. I have

hesitated to use the expression “rational liberty” to denote the German term “vernünftige

Freiheit”. Alas, it is not easy to imagine a more appropriate translation. Instead I have, ten-

tatively, settled on using a circumscription in the form of a conjoined concept of reason and

liberty. This is linguistically clumsy but avoids some of the infelicitous misunderstanding

that might otherwise occur.

BJÖRN WITTROCK 185

analysis has a focus on a broadly dened occidental genealogy, this does not

entail negligence of or indifference to analogous developments on a global

scale both in antiquity and in the modern world.

In fact, there is a near book-length long section in the rst volume devoted

to “a tentative comparison of axial-age world imaginations”. In this section

Habermas has a focus on the same cultural worlds that Weber analysed in

his study of the ethics of economy of the world religions. Thus, Habermas

discusses ancient Judaism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism, and phi

losophical developments in Ancient Greece but leaves the Iranian case to the

side, as did both Weber, although not entirely so, and Bellah.

Habermas (2019) inquiry is focused on ideational phenomena. It includes re

ections on societal and contextual elements of these developments. Howe-

ver an analysis of societal, economic and even geographical aspects of the

type that Weber, and to a considerable extent also Eisenstadt, engaged in,

is not pursed unless there is an immediate relationship to the formation of

different constellations of Faith, philosophy and knowledge.

Habermas points to the fact that Jaspers had been stimulated in his effort

by Max Weber’s studies on the sociology of religion. However, Habermas

emphasizes that despite these efforts of Jaspers, it is only with Shmuel Noah

Eisenstadt that the historical philosophical concept of the Axial Age beco

mes the focus of an interdisciplinary research programme. Furthermore, he

stresses that it is only through the embedding of the concept in this research

context, with social scientists playing a key role, that the seminal nature of

the concept has become apparent; religions are, Habermas continues, not

only reected in the cognitive dimension of imaginations of the world but

are also constitutive for the structuring of early forms of socio-cultural forms

of life in their entirety.

Habermas argues that through religious transmutations in Antiquity, in parti

cular the emergence of a Christian version of Platonic thought in the Roman

Empire, an important point is marked in the development of elements of a

genealogy that will eventually usher in the emergence of, to use Habermas’

term, a post-metaphysical strand of thought that in the course of the nineteen-

th century will become a linguistically interpretable embodiment of an idea

of liberty grounded in reason.

From the early traces in late Antiquity, he explores this genealogy into the

Medieval period and then analyses its further the articulations in the early

modern and modern periods with Hume and Kant eventually outlining two

186 STUDIA POLITICÆ Nº 65 otoño 2025

main philosophical paths. Thus, in this account the spelling out of a conjoi-

ned idea of reason and liberty is a phenomenon of post-metaphysical thou-

ght, drawing on Kant but, in Habermas’ account, with a critically signicant

step taken with the emergence at the turn of the eighteenth century and in the

early nineteenth century of philosophical and linguistic notions, formulated

by Herder, Schleiermacher and Wilhelm von Humboldt. It is this step that

allows notions of reason and liberty to be extended from conceptual formu-

lations into ideas about how they might take societal form via language and

communicative processes with knowing and acting human beings at the core

of the analysis rather than ideas about an objective spirit.

In this genealogy Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Sören Kirkegaard but also

American pragmatism, in particular Charles Sanders Peirce, are some of the

signicant participants in an exploration of the possibilities to formulate a

post-metaphysical idea of reason and liberty. Needless to say, Jürgen Haber

mas himself has, arguably, contributed more than any other social scientist

or social philosopher to the articulation of these types of ideas in the present

age.

Throughout the two volumes, Habermas also returns to and expounds themes

that he has made pioneering contributions to earlier, including the theme of

the legitimacy of rulership, incidentally another area where the research inte

rests of Habermas and Eisenstadt meet.

Finally, Habermas himself has ventured outside of the occidental constella

tion to which he refers. But it is in the case of this constellation that his

analysis has ushered in a rich genealogy that is pursued by way of a detailed

argument at every step. However, it will engender an interest on a global

scale. Hopefully, this may entice scholars to explore analogous genealogies

in the history of philosophy and political thought of other cultural worlds.

If so, the potentials will be greatly enhanced for an understanding both of

features of the contemporary world and of the emergence and grounding of

these features in a history that has some of its anchoring points traceable to

axial developments in different parts of the world in Antiquity and earlier and

sometimes, if in transmuted forms, echoing down to the contemporary age.

6.2. The Sacred and the Modern World: Hans Joas and the Reconstruction

of Social Theory

In his already mentioned book, The Sacredness of the Person: A New Ge

nealogy of Human Rights, Hans Joas (2011/2013) contributed to a dialogue

BJÖRN WITTROCK 187

between scholars in social theory and those with a focus on legal theory.

The book also provided an example of how universalistic claims, inherent in

notions of human rights, are not specic to a particular, occidental, tradition

but might be arrived at from a starting point in different cultural, societal and

religious traditions. With this project, Hans Joas addressed issues that had

preoccupied Ernst Troeltsch in his efforts to discern pathways whereby hu-

man agents from different societal and religious backgrounds, might, throu-

gh human interaction and interpretation, articulate a commitment, expressed

in universalistic terms.

This research programme had also, as already pointed out, links to Joas’ pu

blications on the cultural values of Europe and on world religions and on the

possibilities to extend an action-based analysis to processes of global change.

With this step, Joas once again touched upon themes taken up by Troeltsch,

Weber and other scholars in the period of reconstruction of European social

thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Hans Joas’ contributions in this eld extend and deepen an historical unders

tanding of the role of human action in the constitution of human institutions.

They also highlight links between human action and experiences of a trans-

cendental nature. Thus we arrive at the core of what was at stake, at the time

of reconstruction of social thought, in debates a hundred years ago about

world religions and world history.

In his book, Die Macht des Heiligen [The Power of the Sacred], Hans Joas

(2017) has chosen to focus on these themes and to outline an alternative

to Max Weber’s writings on disenchantment. However, there is an almost

equally extensive and intensive engagement with the concepts of seculariza

tion, rationalization and modernization. There is also a treatment of a range

of other concepts, not least those of differentiation, sacralization and ritual

as well as a discussion of the thesis of the Axial Age and of other historical,

theological and sociological categories, including, if more briey than the

ones just mentioned, the concept of power that also appears in the title of

book.

The enquiry into the uses and validity of the concept of disenchantment ser

ves as a pivot for a scholarly engagement that re-examines the history of the

social and human sciences, the role of contemporary social theory and the

interweaving of sociology, theology and the history of religion. In effect,

Hans Joas outlines a conception of the sociology of religion that draws on

classic works by Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber but that also goes beyond

188 STUDIA POLITICÆ Nº 65 otoño 2025

these works. In particular, Joas proposes a new interpretation of Max We-

ber’s conception of a sociology of religion.

This interpretation is profoundly critical and argues that, through Weber’s use

of concepts that assign magical properties to religious categories, not least to

the sacraments of the Catholic Church, a meaningful dialogue about religion

and society between believers and non-believers tends to become preempted.

Furthermore, Joas (2017) argues that Weber’s concept of Disenchantment en

tails that there is no other way to a modern capitalist economy than that of an

inner-worldly asceticism. This, Joas implies is an unwarranted simplication.

Inherent in Weber’s notion of Disenchantment, there is also a tendency to ex-

clude reversibility and processes whereby antinomies are actualized.

The rst chapters of the book constitute enquiries into ways in which three

(or rather more) disciplines have addressed the history of religion and the

existence of religious practices. Thus the rst has David Hume’s The Natural

History of Religion, originally published in 1757, as its focus. It highlights

the way in which a moral philosopher writes about religion as a natural phe

nomenon with a historical progression.

An important chapter has the title “The Ritual and the Sacred” and is a broad

review of notions in classical and contemporary sociology and anthropology.

The key protagonist is Émile Durkheim. It is a learned and carefully argued

text that leads up to a conclusion that is signicant throughout the rest of the

book, namely the denition that a ritual creates a controlled environment

in which die mechanisms of everyday life are temporarily bracketed. This

provides a setting in which ideal conditions may be experienced and after the

return to everyday life remain in memory as an intense experience.

This denition appears reasonable. It also turns out to be useful in the fur

ther analysis. Two observations may be immediately suggested, namely the

following ones:

First, the chosen denition is by no means limited to Christian religious prac

tices. It would for instance be equally applicable to early Chinese religious

practices.

See e.g. David W. Pankenier (2013), Astrology and Cosmology in Early China: Conform-

ing Earth to Heaven. Cambridge University Press; Michael J. Puett (2001), The Ambiva-

lence of Creation: Debates Concerning Innovation and Artice in Ancient China. Stanford

University Press; Michael J. Puett (2002), To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrice and

Self-Divination in Early China. Harvard University Asia Center for the Harvard-Yenching

Institute.

BJÖRN WITTROCK 189

Second, the denition is only applicable to the practices of so-called Axial

religions, i.e., religions that are premised on the existence of a chasm be-

tween a mundane and transcendental sphere and on the assumption that gods

do not inhabit a blurred zone partially mundane, partially transcendental, nor

that they appear in embodied form as kings, pharaohs or emperors.

These exploratory chapters provide the background for an enquiry into the

possibilities, as they appeared to be in the early twentieth century, for a so

ciology of religion and, indeed, for a scholarly study of religion. Hans Joas

(2017) highlights, as already discussed, two programmes as being particular-

ly seminal and as exemplary for the study of religion in its historical and so-

cietal contexts, namely the historical sociology of the Protestant theologian

Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber’s strongly historically orientated sociology

of religion.

This chapter is followed by one in which sacredness is interpreted reexively

and related to the concept of transcendence. The discussion of this theme has

as its focus the idea of the Axial Age. This idea is subjected to an extensive

enquiry involving both conceptual history, historical sociological arguments

and an examination of contemporary social theory in the light of recent re

search on the Axial Age.

The third of the three analytical chapters is an in-depth discussion of one of

the most signicant texts in the sociology of religion and in Weber’s oeuvre,

namely the famous

Zwischenbetrachtung [intermediary observation], a text that occurs at the

end of the rst of the three volumes with Weber’s collected essays on the

sociology of religion and which has sometimes been described as enigmatic.

Joas (2017) shares this view and argues that Weber’s focus on processes of

rationalization, which are specic for individual spheres of value, highli

ghts tensions in a way that ultimately becomes bewildering and entails a

no longer controllable multiplicity of meanings. Instead, Joas advocates a

historical sociological study, on the basis of a theory of action, of specic

processes of ways in which e.g. economic and political phenomena are be-

ing organized.

7. Max Weber, Hans Joas and the Zwischenbetrachtung

A discussion of the signicance and meaning of the Zwischenbetrachtung

may conveniently start out from an effort to locate this text within the context

190 STUDIA POLITICÆ Nº 65 otoño 2025

of Weber’s oeuvre in general and the collected essays on the sociology of

religion in particular.

As to the overall structure of the volumes of the Collected Essays on the

Sociology of Religion, it has been pointed out that Max Weber pursued his

analysis of the great world religions in a form that entails a movement from

East to West. This form corresponded to a convention that had become esta

blished in scholarly works in German that dealt with different cultures in the

Old World. However, the rst two essays of the collected essays deviate from

this form. Instead, they were reprinted but revised versions of the two essays

that dealt with occidental phenomena, namely the two essays on the spirit of

capitalism and the Protestant ethic and the Protestant sects respectively that

had been published some decade and a half before the publication of the rst

volume of the collected essays.

Thereby, Weber introduced a dynamic element into his account that could

serve as a background for comparative observations of the developments in

the Near and Far Occident of Europe and the United States (the empirical

domain for the major part of the discussion of the Protestant sects). The two

opening chapters with the revised essays on the Protestant ethic and the Pro

testant sects and their relationship to the Spirit of Capitalism also provided

an analytical focus for the work as a whole. Furthermore, these two chapters

are preceded by the Vorbemerkung to the essays in their entirety. This intro-

ductory “remark” involves both a delineation of a theoretical focus and an

assessment of the methodological nature and dependence of the exercise.

As to the analytical focus, the rst sentence of the introductory remark poses

the question “

… which chain of conditions have entailed that precisely on the ground of

the West, and only here, cultural phenomena appeared that however —as

we at least like to imagine— lay in a direction of development of universal

importance and validity. (Weber, 1978, p. 1)

This statement and the subsequent outline of the structure of Weber’s argu-

ment has led observers to argue that Weber proposes an analysis that will

amount to a sociology of absences, i.e. notations of which phenomena where

lacking in extra-European settings to bring about a development of universal

signicance (Arjomand, 2004; Pommeranz, 2000). Needless to say, this sta-

tement does not in itself entail a specic value commitment either in general

or in personal terms. It indicates, however, a perspective as to which pheno-

mena will be further considered in Weber’s analysis.

BJÖRN WITTROCK 191

It is against this background that the Vorbemerkung may be seen as consti-

tuting an analytical focus for the work as a whole that ultimately aims at an

understanding of the emergence of modern capitalism in some parts of the

world — and the slow or aborted emergence of it in other parts. Furthermore,

such an understanding does not have or aim at the form of the identication

of a strictly causal mechanism that were able to unambiguously explain and

predict the emergence of a particular form of economic organization and be-

havior, i.e. modern capitalism based on a systematic conduct of life in perso-

nal life and techniques of rational calculation in the economic sphere. Rather

Weber’s objective is to formulate grounded propositions about the internal

dynamics in different domains of human activity. Such propositions have a

degree of analogy to law-like statements but are not of a strictly deductive

nature. Instead, Weber aspires to an understanding of pervasive tendencies

and antinomies that constitute the conceptually possible spaces in which so-

cietal developments evolve.

This is made additionally clear in the so-called Einleitung [introduction] to

the part of the entire work that follows after the Vorbemerkung [preface] and

the two revised essays on Protestantism, i.e. to the volumes that have as their

common theme “Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen. Vergleichende Re

ligionssoziologische Versuche” (Weber, 1991a).

In the preface to the collected essays, there is a carefully circumscribed ac

count of the dependence of Weber’s analysis on secondary sources and the

statement that a real expert, “of course”, will nd nothing new. Instead the

justication for the analysis lies in its elucidation of an analytic problem

concerning causation, the rise of a specic modern form of economic orga-

nization, and the need to construct a causal mechanism to account for that.

Such an account can only be outlined, Weber argues, by drawing on his

torical scholarship that sheds light on one if its components in the form of

empirical studies of the ethics of economy of world religions in their societal

and historical contexts. As a consequence, Weber’s collected essays on the

sociology of religion reect the state of knowledge across a wide eld of

scholarship as it looked at the time of the former turn of a century and in the

rst two decades of the twentieth century in the academic communities of the

German — and English-speaking worlds.

The whole oeuvre begins, as already mentioned, with an assertion of the uni-

que achievements in the West in creating science, rational procedures in all

See also Weber (1991) ”Nachwort des Herausgebers“, Studienausgabe.

192 STUDIA POLITICÆ Nº 65 otoño 2025

spheres of life and a systematic and rational conduct of life. However, there

is an element of doubt inserted by the side-reection stating that this is at

least what we like to believe is the case. After hundreds of pages of empirical

reports and theoretical reections, the collection then closes the second volu-

me with still asserting the unique achievements of the West in creating scien-

ce out of art and out of this technologies of war resulting in “progress, as

we call it”. Thus a sense of antinomy and inner tension lingers, if differently

expressed in different passages, throughout the collection. This may perhaps

not be surprising for a work that was written during and in the immediate

wake of the most lethal war conducted in Europe for centuries. However,

what is remarkable is the sense of intellectual focus present on every page.

In exploring mechanisms whereby world religions may exert a formative in

uence on key societal practices, Weber came to highlight knowledge about

ways in which ethical systems of world religions are contextually consti-

tuted. In the collected essays on the sociology of religion, there are four

sections of the rst volume in which Weber explicitly formulates questions

about these issues, namely in the Vorbemerkung [preface] to the whole set

of volumes, in the Einleitung [introduction] to the series, which appears

in the rst volume immediately before the section on Confucianism and

Daoism, in the summarizing presentation of the results of his analysis of

Confucianism and Daoism, including comparative reections relative to Pu-

ritan forms of Christianity, Resultat, and nally in the concluding section

of volume one, Zwischenbetrachtung [intermediary observation], which is

an extensive exposé, presenting both empirical observations and theoretical

conjectures and with its latter parts written in a style that Hans Joas charac-

terizes as, to some extent, almost “hymn-like”. (The third part of the second

volume on Hinduism and Buddhism is consistently comparative in its orien-

tation but does, not except for the nal 12 pages, provide an overview of

the “general character of Asiatic religiosity”). The third volume, on Ancient

Judaism, nally, is almost entirely devoted to the rst millennium BCE and

the rst millennium CE).

One may perhaps state that Weber’s Collected Essays on the Sociology of Re

ligion are permeated by two major antinomies. The rst one, already alluded,

to is constituted by Weber’s ambiguous relationship to the achievements of

the Occident. Through a rational conduct of life and a systematic application

of rational techniques, an efcient regulation of social life has been achieved

as has a previously unimaginable extension of productive and destructive

forces manifested in industrial life and modern warfare.

BJÖRN WITTROCK 193

This antinomy, which some observers have criticized as ushering in a socio-

logy of absences, is related to another, and perhaps more fundamental one,

namely that of delineating what is to be elucidated and understood, in other

words what constitutes the ultimate explanandum of the essays. Despite the

initial declaration that the analytical focus is constituted by an effort to lay

bare the ethics of economics inherent in different world religions, the domain

of inquiry is not contained within the demarcations suggested by this deli-

neation. There are also analyses that may appear as elements of a sociology

of human interactions in their global and historical contexts in the period

during and after the emergence of world religions.

In this perspective, the Zwischenbetrachtung is the section in the oeuvre as a

whole, where a sustained effort is made to outline, on the basis on the empi

rical materials presented in the rst volume, a conceptual scheme explicating

basic patterns of interaction in and between different “spheres” of human

life, although the section limits its attention, apart from the analysis of world

religions themselves, to four spheres (the economic, the political, the aes-

thetic and the erotic) plus the domain of science and systematic knowledge.

This conceptual explication is, in turn, based on assumptions about internal

dynamics inherent in these different spheres (Eigengesetzlichkeiten). Weber

demonstrates how the internal dynamics of some social spheres tend to un

dermine the dening characteristics of these spheres themselves. In other

cases, he seeks to demonstrate that an intensied and more complete reali-

zation of the tendencies inherent in the internal logic of a given sphere may

thwart developments in another sphere. Thus Weber persuasively argues that

it is inherently impossible to maintain a religious commitment to universal

brotherly love and support of a religious community while simultaneously

maximizing the realization of the type of rationality inherent in economic

processes in a modern capitalist economy. As a result, the economically pro-

t-maximizing entrepreneur will either have to give up the idea of brother-

hood, or else maintain it but see it as guaranteed by a divine omniscience and

omnibenevolence that transcends human cognition or else retain the idea in

the form of a seemingly universal but in reality solipsistic form of acomism

of universal love.

These types of analyses, are relatively straight-forward when it comes to

the spheres of economy and political order, including war. When it comes

to spheres of the aesthetic and the erotic, the focus shifts once again. We are

now dealing with human forces that are both powerful and may seem remote

from considerations of at least immediate rationality. (Some late twentie

194 STUDIA POLITICÆ Nº 65 otoño 2025

th-century economists would disagree, but for Weber there is a profound

divide between the internal logic inherent in these spheres.) Still, one might,

perhaps, even here pursue an analysis of the consequences of processes of

an increasingly radical manifestation of features inherent in the internal logic

dominating in different spheres.

A prerequisite for further advances in these respects, seems, however, to be

an analysis of which sets of phenomena Weber designates as entities about

which features such as that of exhibiting the property of being rational may

be predicated. Even at a glance, it is obvious that the range of such phe

nomena even when it comes to Weber’s use of a term such as rational is

wide and encompasses not only individual actions, but bundles of actions

and practices and also institutional arrangements as well as sets of human

dispositions. Furthermore, some forms of sociality obtaining among some

members of society, are so closely bound to a concept of rationality as to

make the link a near-conceptual rather than a causal one, e.g. in the role of

a sense of brotherhood, transcending commitments of family and kin, in the

process of constituting a modern capitalist economy. This may constitute, to

paraphrase Hans Joas, a situation characterized by a no longer controllable

multiplicity of meanings. However, it may also be seen as a situation where

the imaginary and richness of conjectures in the Zwischenbetrachtung may

serve as a source of inspiration in the realm of scholarly discovery rather than

that of justication.

Irrespective of this, Die Macht des Heiligen constitutes a major scholarly

achievement. Hans Joas (2017) has outlined key requirements for a sociolo

gy of religion and a global intellectual history in which the Axial Age marks

a crucial juncture. Drawing on but also transcending contributions by Karl

Jaspers, Robert Bellah and Shmuel Eisenstadt he has demonstrated that we

may use the term Axiality as an analytical category to characterize tenden-

cies in the contemporary world as well as in that of Antiquity.

In his research, Hans Joas has rediscovered and recongured intellectual ave

nues that link contemporary scholars to a classical heritage. He has analyzed

how human beings have coped with the impact of wars and catastrophic

events. However, he has also demonstrated that there is always a potential,

despite all differences, for human beings to jointly articulate values which

may be characterized as universalistic and that embrace the sacredness of the

person. For these and his many other achievements to the benet of us all,

the international community of scholars owes its deepest gratitude to Hans

Joas.

BJÖRN WITTROCK 195

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