John Stuart-Glennie's Lost Theory of the Moral Revolution, 75 Years before Jaspers' Theory of the Axial Age

Karl Jaspers published his theory of the Axial Age in 1949, yet 75 years earlier, in 1873, unknown to Jaspers and to contemporary scholars today, folklorist John Stuart Stuart-Glennie elaborated the first fully developed and nuanced theory of what he termed “the Moral Revolution” to characterize the historical shift around roughly 600 BCE in a variety of civilizations, most notably ancient China, India, Judaism, and Greece, as part of a broader critical philosophy of history. He wrote further on the idea over decades and also presented his ideas to the Sociological Society of London in 1905.

This paper discusses Stuart-Glennie’s ideas, including his projection in 1905 of a “United States of Europe” by the twenty-first century; D. H. Lawrence’s independent contributions to an original understanding of the phenomena twenty years before Jaspers, Lewis Mumford’s seldom acknowledged writings on the phenomena, and my own way of characterizing this history. These sources represent new and alternative routes for understanding what until now has been characterized as the axial age.