Sociology’s missed opportunity: John Stuart-Glennie’s lost theory of the moral revolution, also known as the axial age

In 1873, 75 years before Karl Jaspers published his theory of the Axial Age in 1949, unknown to Jaspers and to contemporary scholars today, Scottish 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 emerging roughly around 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 continued to write on the idea over decades in books and articles and also presented his ideas to the fledgling Sociological Society of London in 1905, which were published the following year in the volume Sociological Papers, Volume 2. This article discusses Stuart-Glennie’s ideas on the moral revolution in the context of his philosophy of history, including what he termed “panzooinism”; ideas with implications for contemporary debates in theory, comparative history, and sociology of religion. It shows why he should be acknowledged as the originator of the theory now known as the axial age, and also now be included as a significant sociologist in the movement toward the establishment of sociology

Israel and the Cosmological Empires of the Ancient Orient. Symbols of Order in Eric Voegelin's "Order and History", Vol. 1

The essays collected in the present volume are the output of an interdisciplinary conference on Israel and Revelation, the first volume of Eric Voegelin\u2019s Order and History, held in Munich, May 15th\u201316th, 2017 and sponsored by the Voegelin-Zentrum f\ufcr Politik, Kultur und Religion at the Geschwister-Scholl-Institute (LMU Munich) and the Department of Philosophy of the Catholic University of the Sacred Hearth (Milan). The goal of the initiative consisted, in one way, in offering new perspectives on the reading of Israel and Revelation, and in another way, to call on the carpet ambiguities and discrepancies of the book. In front of the markedly interdisciplinary character of Israel and Revelation, some contributions addressed the integration of themes treated by the different disciplines the work approaches: philosophy, theology, archaeology, Ancient Oriental studies, Jewish studies, political theory. Others instead focused on the originality of the hermeneutic approach, which adds a horizon of meaning that is far wider than those of the individual disciplines involved in the work. As a result, it thus emerged that Israel and Revelation preserves within it a range of stimuli that still await development, and whose potentiality concerns both the individual areas from which the investigation draws as well as its general theoretical framework