a note on the three orientations 455fused by a discrepancy in the range of the events that form the subject
matters of these two approaches.
A common proposition in the writing about the Axial Age is that the
Axial changes occurred only in circumstances of disruption of an im-
perial order or prior to its imposition, and were regularly brought to an
end by the consolidation of empire. Jaspers emphasized the destabiliz-
ing and globalizing signifi cance of the interactions between sedentary
states and nomadic peoples in Eurasia, a suggestion containing more
insight than most of the literature that followed.* Eisenstadt and his
school focused, instead, on internal pluralism and confl ict, highlight-
ing the way in which ideas associated with the Axial revolutions helped
produce a contest between secular and sacred sources of authority.
Th e religions and philosophies that pioneered the formulation of
each of the three orientations addressed in the initial parts of this book
began in the imperial regimes of Eurasia. Th ey almost invariably arose
at the periphery, not in the heart or in the formative moments, of the
agrarian- bureaucratic states that, until recently, have been the major
protagonists in world history. For them, empire, although it may have
been the enemy, was also the condition of emergence and diff usion.
In this respect, the historical presuppositions of my account are
closer to the views of the anathematized and incomparable universal
historian Arnold Toynbee about the “higher religions” and their relation
to “universal states” than they are to the foundational writings of the
Axial Age thesis. In Toynbee’s narrative (A Study of History, vol. 6, part
2, 1954, and An Historian’s Approach to Religion, 1979), an “internal
proletariat,” trapped in the oppressive structures of a universal state
and resistant to its self- idolizing rulers, fi nds inspiration in a message
of ascent to a life closer to the divine. It looks beyond the recurrent
perversions of “archaism,” “futurism,” and “detachment” to “transcen-
dence.” It is not the nascent universal churches that are instruments of
these states or “chrysalises” of new civilization. It is rather these states
that are, as Hegel had already suggested, the prison- houses within
which humanity achieved deeper spiritual insight.
* On the signifi cance of these interactions, see my book Plasticity into Power:
Comparative- Historical Studies on the Institutional Conditions of Economic and Mili-
tary Success, 1987, pp. 70– 80, 110– 112.