Hartmut Rosa – Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, Erfurt University
Thermostatlessness: The Project of Modernity and the Process of Modernization: Reflections on Robert Bellah’s Account of the Late Modern Predicament
In one of the last lectures Robert N. Bellah gave to the academic world, his Notre Dame Lecture printed in the proposed volume, he made it exceptionally clear that a full account of modernity as a historical social formation, and with it an acute diagnosis of our late modern predicament, requires a dual analysis, or a combination of two distinct perspectives. This duality is indicated already in the title of his lecture: The Project of Modernity in the Light of Human Evolution. With the latter term – Human Evolution – the focus is, so to speak, on a third person perspective, i.e., on an ‘outside’, structural perspective that observes the historical changes in the patterns of social organization and metabolism with nature. But with the first half of the title – The Project of Modernity – the light is on the first person perspective: It denotes the modern aspiration towards a good life couched in moral and ethical terms, drawing on the hopes and fears motivating this project from a cultural and hermeneutical perspective. Since Bellah sadly left us before he could take up the challenge of spelling out how the two sides go together, I will try to jump in for him and give an answer to the question he ends with: How do the two parts and their accompanying revolutionary turns fit together? I propose that we should start by distinguishing the two parts as the ethico-political project of modernity, centred on the notion of autonomy, on the one hand (the cultural perspective) and the process of modernization that yields the escalatory increases in energy capture as well as organizational, war-making and information-technological capacities on the other hand (the structural perspective). The pressing question than can be reformulated in this way: How do the project of modernity and the process of modernization fit together?
Kyle Harper – University of Oklahoma
Turning off Nature’s Thermostats: Technology, Ecology, and Deep History
This essay reflects on Robert Bellah’s 2013 lecture at Notre Dame in which he introduces the term “thermostatlessness” as a shorthand for the modern condition. By drawing both from population ecology as well as economic history, it is possible to explore Bellah’s idea and to support the argument that premodern societies were “regulated.” Indeed, in much the same way that all animal populations are regulated by e.g. scarcity of food or the pressures of parasitism and predation, premodern human societies were effectively “zero growth” societies over the long run. The essay considers some important caveats and qualifications to this “hockey stick” view of human history, and it takes the Roman Empire as a case study of how some of the regulatory mechanisms worked in practice. But the argument is that Bellah’s proposal for dividing human history into two periods – one with strong, one with weak regulatory mechanisms – is defensible and insightful.
Alan Strathern – University of Oxford
Axiality and the Critique of Power: Some Historical Notes
Implicit in Bellah’s Prologue and other late papers is the connection between post-Axial religiosity and the subordination of kingship. I describe this post-Axial impulse as transcendentalism, which may be contrasted with a universal religiosity of immanentism. Much of the chapter proceeds by considering some qualifications or contradictions to the association between transcendentalism and the disenchantment and delegitimization of monarchy, reflecting on the broader distribution of egalitarian sensibilities, the ways in which immanentism might tame kingship through ritualisation, and the power of transcendentalism to buttress monarchical power and imperial projection. However, ultimately, this chapter endorses the idea that transcendentalism yielded a powerful dislodging of the normative centrality of kingship, and notes that reformist movements and millenarian movements were among very few means by which monarchies could be subject to ideological challenge in the pre-modern world. However, where Bellah’s prologue confines itself to the Christian West, the rest of this essay raises the question of how we might draw in the Asian transcendentalisms. Did the capacity of Buddhism, Islam, Confucianism to reframe the meaning of politics produce any incipient movements towards principles of individual autonomy and the popular arbitration of rulership? Or did they allow a particularly strong engagement with such currents emanating from the West? Lastly, a postscript offers some reflections on how Axial and non-Axial religions might relate to the climate crisis.
Joel Robbins – University of Cambridge
The Search for a Serious Ethical Form of Individualism: Bellah, Tillich and the Anthropology of Christian Individualism
I am going to draw most directly on the paper “Paul Tillich and the Challenge of Modernity.” In particular, I want to pick up the issue of the search for “a serious ethical form of individualism” that is at the heart of this paper and indeed of many of Bellah’s other works as well. I will consider his efforts to define a form of individualism that finds itself in society and not in opposition to it in relation both to his use of Tillich’s arguments and to recent debates in the anthropology of Christianity about the individualist but also relationalist affordances of various parts of the Christian tradition. In doing so, I will elaborate my arguments in relation to my own fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, as well as in dialogue with ethnographic work done by others on Christian groups throughout the world. Finally, I will consider whether Bellah’s own cultivation of a prophetic voice that does not leave the academic world behind is the clearest model he offers us of what an ethical individualism might look like.
Hans Joas – Humboldt-Universität
Organic Social Ethics: Universalism without Egalitarianism
In the original outline of his global history of religion we can see that Robert Bellah did not plan to move directly from the Axial Age to Modernity. Instead he intended to study the „secondary formations“ in the history of postaxial religion (like Christianity and Islam) and the „organic social ethic“ of these religions and in South and East Asia. My paper is an attempt to deal with this part of the story that is missing between the existing book and the fragments for its continuation. The paper first traces the origins of this concept in Weber. For this purpose it goes back to the work of the German legal historian Otto von Gierke, one of Weber’s academic teachers, and then to Wilhelm Dilthey and Ernst Troeltsch. It then analyses the difference between Weber, on the one hand, for whom organic social ethics is mostly an obstacle for rationalization, and, on the other hand, Gierke and Troeltsch who see in it (and in medieval Christianity) a fruitful compromise between a religiously inspired moral universalism and inegalitarian social structures. In the following section It asks how we have to understand the relationship between universalism and egalitarianism in Islam and Hinduism. In sum, the paper attempts to make understandable that historically and culturally universalism has not always meant egalitarianism. My intention is not to defend inegalitarian social structures, but to sensitize us to the inner logic of an important phase in the history of moral universalism.
