Abstract
This extremely valuable collection is based in part on a virtual conference organised by Ĺubomír Dunaj in Vienna in 2021 to mark Jóhann Árnason’s 80th birthday. The contributors have all engaged (in many cases very closely) with Árnason’s work over the past years, and they bring to the book a wide variety of critical perspectives and possible extensions of it.
Árnason is one of those theorists who turns up in many different contexts: critical theory, on which he wrote his first book (1971) and most recently in this journal (2023), and the theorisation of state socialism, under which he had lived in the 1960s (1993) 1 and of European integration (2019). The core of his work is a distinctive conception of human civilisations, involving the interplay of culture and power, which he has developed in a wide variety of historical and geographical frames and presented most fully in Árnason (2003). Reworking Karl Jaspers’ (1953) conception of the Achsenzeit or Axial Age around 500 BCE, in his recent work Árnason has looked even further back and also engaged closely with anthropology, notably in a co-edited book focused on Eurasia. 2
As Axel Honneth notes in his preface to the present book (p. 2), Árnason moved …away from the premises of the Habermasian theory according to which social development depends primarily upon world-historical rationalizing processes…[to]…an alternative conception: it is the specific world-interpretation of a given cultural and civilizational space that first decides what…counts as increasing rational knowledge – and thus what should be understood as ‘rationalization’ in the first place.
Jiři Šubrt, who had founded with Árnason a programme in historical sociology at Charles University in Prague, contrasts historical sociology with social constructionism and thus implicitly raises a question which runs through the book as a whole: should comparative and historical sociology be seen, as it standardly is, as a sub-variant of sociology, or should it rather be the default approach of any sociology, thus challenging what Norbert Elias, an important figure for both Árnason and Šubrt, had criticised as ‘the retreat of sociologists into the present’? Šubrt ends with an important question of whether in sociology there is ‘a tendency to attribute to time those properties that are characteristic of the movement that takes place in time’ (p. 46). 3
The chapter by Saïd Amir Arjomand opens up the question of world regions in relation to multiple modernities which also runs through the book as a whole. Arjomand focuses on the neglected topic of the ‘Persianate cosmopolis’. Jeremy Smith, in a later chapter in the book, refers substantially to the work of Arjomand and Peter Katzenstein in his discussion of the better-known region of the Americas and the regional processes within and between states. Smith explores what he calls ‘the regionality of regions’ (p. 215) in relation to the southwestern United States and also Central America and the Caribbean.
Peter Wagner, whose long-standing reflections on modernity have increasingly focused on global themes, tackles the issue of whether modernity should be seen in normative or, as Árnason prefers, in more neutral terms. If one sees autonomy, in the sense of ‘higher…levels of human intervention in the world’ (Adams and Árnason, 2022, p. 342) as central to modernity, as Árnason does, it is hard not to derive a positive normative evaluation. Bondage may be an agreeable sexual practice for some people, but it is hard to conceive it as a meaningful option for life. The argument can be presented in many ways, but perhaps best ex negativo, as in Max Weber’s classic statement about science or scholarship as a profession: A choice must be made between ‘the ultimately possible attitudes to life’…Someone ‘who cannot bear the fate of the times…should rather return into the arms of the old churches…’. (Weber, 1968, pp. 608, 612)
An important element here is the modern state ‘as a powerful institutional entity’ (p. 86), which Wolfgang Knöbl’s chapter locates in relation to social imaginaries and ‘rather late within modernity’ (p. 89), closer to 1900 and ‘the first two or three decades of the twentieth century’ (p. 86). This may however be compatible with a historical and conceptual view of the political ‘within the broader social context’ (Árnason, 2023, p. 335), as Kurt Mertel suggests with reference to Heidegger and also Castoriadis.
In thinking about the antecedents of modernity, we are pushed back a long way to reflection on the ‘Axial Age’, provided here by Hans Schelkshorn. No one today would of course speak of the ‘goal of history’, and, as Schelkshorn notes (p. 118), Jaspers (1953, p. 10) himself gives his project what we might call a more existentialist twist in claiming that ‘the source of our understanding is our own present’. Jaspers’ conception however inspires ‘a comparison between Jaspers, Eisenstadt/Árnason and Habermas, which will show that the Axial Age serves as a historical background for completely distinct interpretations of modernity’ (pp. 117–118).
Schelkshorn’s chapter, along with the one following it, by Hans-Herbert Kögler, form in many ways the heart of the book. As Schelkshorn notes, Eisenstadt and Árnason reject the idea, deriving from Jaspers’ emphasis on Western technology, ‘of a linear and global spread of European modernity’ (p. 121), but also the idea of closed and conflicting civilisations found in Spengler and Huntington. Habermas, by contrast, develops a more holistic conception tracing a connection between the Axial Age and post-metaphysical thinking and what Schelkshorn calls, a little more speculatively, ‘post-metaphysical modernity’ (p. 121). Habermas’s theory of global modernity…embraces three levels: global system mechanisms, especially capitalism and the bureaucratic state; the identity discourses of the axial civilizations; and a post-metaphysical normative setting that enables the political ideals of the European Enlightenment to be applied to global modernity. (p. 127)
Enter hermeneutics, we might say. Kögler addresses the question: ‘Can the value-orientations of the Axial Age discourse be preserved as cognitive universals after the demise of their emergence in metaphysical world-views? This essay aims at an affirmative answer by building on hermeneutic insights’ (p. 133). Kögler presents Árnason’s ‘rehistoricization’ of the Axial Age, involving five major processes: ‘world articulation as such’ (Árnason, 2013, p. 355), especially in Greek thought and perhaps Daoism, ‘recentering of the world’ (Árnason, 2013, p. 356), notably in Jewish monotheism, ‘world negation’ (Árnason, 2013, p. 358) in Indian thought, ‘world extension’ (Árnason, 2013, pp. 358–359) in historical consciousness and humanisation (Árnason, 2013, p. 359) in Greece, China and India. The Axial quality of these new world-orientations may…perhaps best be captured by first detecting the emergence of their shared feature as second-order thought, i.e. the critical and ‘transcending’ thematization of the previous symbolic and social practices…’. (p. 137) to a very specific type of modernity. The alternative hermeneutic option…situates itself internally in each tradition as the shared premises of an in each case unavoidably interpretative and culturally situated practice.
Religion, which Arjomand has addressed in relation to axial civilisations in a co-edited book (Arjomand and Kalberg, 2021), is also the focus of the two remaining chapters to be discussed here. Armando Salvatore and Kieko Obuse discuss the European and Japanese response to the Islamosphere from the seventeenth century onwards, including, hilariously, Leibniz’s plan to persuade the French king to invade Egypt (p. 182). More sinisterly, in the light of the current war, Yulia Prozorova discusses what Árnason has called the ‘religio-political nexus’ in the context of imperial, Soviet and contemporary Russia. The “monistic unity” with political domination, and the unification of religious and political powers subjugated and embodied by an autocratic ruler or a state authority, represents Russia’s paradigmatic pattern, which reproduces in different historical contexts within different politico-theological or political-ideological frameworks. (p. 209)
Discussions of Árnason typically include a remark to the effect that he is the most significant social theorist whom you may not have heard of. This neglect is compounded by the range of his work, with the result that, as with the much less neglected Habermas, academics are often aware of only one dimension of their work. Publishers are often suspicious of edited books, especially if they emanate from conferences and might seem shop-soiled, though now books are increasingly packaged (and perhaps read) as multiple chapters, the difference from monographs is less meaningful. It should I hope be clear that this is a really exceptional volume, both in the quality and expertise of its contributors and in its range, which matches that of its subject.