Jaspers was not a sociologist, but he had—especially through his concept of the Axial Age (Achsenzeit)—a powerful influence on sociology. The Axial Age became a specifically cultural and macrosociological subject. No other discipline was as stimulated by Jaspers's concept of the Axial Age as sociology. No other book by Jaspers, and perhaps no other philosophical work of the era, has exerted such a strong influence on this discipline with regard to its historical orientation.

History of the Concept

The concept of the Axial Age (Achsenzeit) in Jaspers's thought dates back to the late 1930s. He apparently developed it in the course of his study of Chinese and Indian philosophy. As early as March 1938, he wrote to Indologist Heinrich Zimmer of his “envisioning of philosophy through a universal-historical lens,” noting that it was “as if one were standing before the gates of an extraordinary insight—but couldn't quite manage to push the gate open.”

This insight can only refer to the phenomenon for which he was soon to coin the term “Achsenzeit,” an attempt to convey the thesis of the approximate simultaneity of intellectual movements between 800 and 200 bc in East and West. However, Jaspers's colleague, cultural sociologist Alfred Weber (an avowed opponent of the Nazi regime, who, like Jaspers, had to give up his teaching activities and embark upon “inner emigration”) had already tackled the same issue some years earlier. In his 1935 book Kulturgeschichte als Kultursoziologie, he referred to a “synchronistic global age” (“synchronistisches Weltzeitalter”) that he attributed to the overlaying of the West by the equestrian peoples of the East. Jaspers and Weber were in close contact. Weber's project and thus this theme could not possibly have escaped him. Jaspers's “extraordinary insight” did not, therefore, consist in the insight per se, but in the philosophical interpretation of the phenomenon at issue—which Weber interpreted quite differently. In Jaspers's text “Wende der Universalgeschichte” (Turn of universal history), presumably written in 1941 for a publication in Japan, the term and the concept “Axial Age” are already present; these ten pages to some extent correspond, partly verbatim, to pages 19–25 of Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (The Origin and Goal of History).