Multiple Modernities, Universal History and the Quest for a Civilizational Paradigma

The following reflections are a hermeneutical exercise in inter-civilizational interpretation focusing on the crucial aspects of Voegelin’s fourth volume The Ecumenic Age, that went beyond Voegelin’s original Eurocentrism and postulated the emergence of a new type of economic humanity reaching as a millennial constant into the modern civilization. This concept postulated that this millennial constant is also marked by a manyfold of civilizational legacies that shape the institutional and interpretative patterns of modernity. This revision of the original program implied a reinterpretation of Jaspers concept of the axial age that opened up a new era of historical scholarship caried on by the research program ‘Comparative Civilizations’ of Shmuel Eisenstadt and his school that interconnected with the Voegelinian theoretical program. This essay summarizes some essential results in this sense. Eisenstadt suggests an inter-civilizational analytical framework offering different modalities of modernity in that he first explores the rise of Western modernity within a global world of multiple modernities, and, second, traces essential features of them back to the historical ‘break-through’ of the axial age ‘in terms of the grand symbolic forms of past civilizational ideas of order. Third, global modernity entails historical configurations that determine present patterns of power conflicts emerging from clashes between different worldviews leading up to a global re-calibration of the international order

Epistemology · Globalization and Cultural Identity · History · Philosophy · World Systems and Global Transformations