Modernity As an Axial Age?: Between Transition and Reinterpretation

Modernity is a troubled subject. It is centered on two oppositions: on the one side, the affirmation of the centrality of the individual (primacy of personal conscience, liberty of thought and enterprise, passage “from status to contract” - to borrow the famous sentence of Henry Maine); on the opposite side, the coming back of the dimension of the “social” (the body politics, the state as a “governing force” both on an economic and a social level, the duties towards men’s cultural identities, etc.).  In one sense, this is the “revenge” of religion as a way of shaping the human mind.  Religion is, in fact, either the relation of individual destiny with its significance to be found in a God or the sharing of what man learns from such individual relations within a context of social inclusion (a church, a sect, a philosophical circle, etc.). The story of these relationships is varied and intriguing.  It takes into account different eras in the frame of the five centuries referred to, with different national and cultural variations and different political and social interpretation of this long historical transition.

At the Italian-German Historical Institute in Trento a group of researchers deal with this subject since 2011.  I will present the results of this work and discuss why the period considered could be shaped into the concept of “axial age” as Karl Jasper proposed in 1949 and as Shmuel Eisenstadt elaborated it as “second axial age.”