Political Philosophy

The Origin and Goal of History

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Karl Jaspers

1949

The Origin and Goal of History is Jaspers's philosophy of history — his most ambitious attempt to understand the whole arc of human civilisation and to ask whether it has a direction, a meaning, and an end. The book's central contribution is the concept of the Axial Age: Jaspers's observation that an extraordinary spiritual breakthrough occurred simultaneously across four civilisations — Greece, Israel, Persia, and China — between approximately 800 and 200 BC. In this period, the great philosophical and religious traditions that still shape human life today (Greek philosophy, the Hebrew prophets, Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Jainism) all arose independently, constituting what Jaspers calls the "axis" around which subsequent history has turned. The book also addresses the modern crisis — the threat of a technological mass society that destroys individual Existenz — and asks whether a second Axial Age is possible: a new spiritual breakthrough equal to the first.