Religious Autonomy and Religious Entrepreneurship: An Evolutionary-Institutionalist’s Take on the Axial Age

Through the first millennium BCE, religio-cultural revolutions occurred in China, Greece, Israel, and India. Commonly referred to as the Axial Age, this epoch has been identified by some scholars as period of parallel evolution in which many of the World Religions appeared for the first time and humanity was forever changed. Axial scholarship, however, remains in an early stage as many social scientists and historians question the centrality of this era in the human story, while other unsettled debates revolve around what was common across each case. The paper below considers the Axial Age from an evolutionary-institutionalist’s perspective: what was axial was (1) the first successful religio-cultural entrepreneurs in human history and, thereby, (2) the evolution of autonomous religious spheres distinct from kinship and polity. Like the Urban Revolutions that qualitatively transformed human societies 3,000 years prior, the Axial Age represents a reconfiguration of the physical, temporal, social, and symbolic space in irreversible ways.