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).

An Intellectual Context

In the second half of the nineteenth century, two currents of theoretical reflection assumed a central position in Germany. These currents shaped, and were themselves shaped by, the establishment of the unified nation-state from the 1840s to the 1870s. First, the initial move toward national unification in the late 1840s found reflection in the broad array of outlooks often associated with historicism. Politically, the historicist position was expressed in anti-formalist theories of constitutional order, based in the presumption that constitutional law expresses, but abstract or natural rights, but the incrementally formed will of the people. This position influenced the liberal constitutional vision of 1848, and it remained powerful after unification. By the 1870s, historicism had clearly divided into separate political camps, including a national democratic wing and an organic social-liberal wing. At the same time, historicism extended beyond political reflection, and it established the foundations for a range of theories concerned with historical and cultural hermeneutics, closely linked to liberal nationalism, which emphasized the integrally historical origins of human cognition and understanding. Second, the consolidation of the German nation-state after 1871 was supported by a body of theories defined as positivism. Positivism comprised a wide range of stances, whose unifying presumption was that human reflection should be properly concerned with the construction of objective facts. This was presented in a highly influential body of research on legal formation, which condensed legal analysis around the interpretation of formal legal principles, tending to reduce the weight of moral-rational or utilitarian ideas in the application of law.

Different positions in the historicist and positivist camps were openly hostile to each other. This was reflected in personal controversies between exponents of these two loosely defined lineages. It was also expressed in the fact that, as positivism placed emphasis on strict objective interpretation, it weakened the validity claims set out by historicists, who assumed that objects of scientific investigation, including social institutions, should be evaluated and rendered meaningful as accretions of national cultural life. Moreover, by the end of the nineteenth century, historicist thinkers expressly understood historical research as reposing on a critique of the natural sciences.

In its breathless preoccupation with recency and novelty, the news seems to present a perpetual present. News is interested in what has just happened and what is about to happen. One story displaces another as the sensation du jour, and the passing panorama does not invite reflection on how the news has changed. Nor, apart from proclaiming the heroism of their own reporters, do news presentations invite reflection on how news is produced, let alone on how newsgathering practices and the media's sense of newsworthiness have changed over the years. Newspapers are part of the social fabric, their role and nature usually taken for granted, but the newspaper has a dynamic history, and its place in the social fabric has been very different at different times.

This book looks at Australian newspapers over the half-century following the introduction of television in 1956. Through a quantitative study of their content, it examines central aspects of newspapers, their formats and structure, their story priorities and aspects of their political and international coverage. It is the largest content analysis of the Australian press ever undertaken.

There are many very good histories of the Australian press. The most comprehensive and penetrating are by Young (2019, 2023). There are also good histories of major organisations, such as Fairfax (Souter 1981, 1991), the Packer empire (Griffen-Foley 1999) and the ABC (Inglis 1983, 2006); of media moguls, such as Frank Packer (Griffen-Foley 2014), Kerry Packer (Barry 2007) and Sir Keith Murdoch (Roberts 2015), as well as celebrated editors, such as the Age's Graham Perkin (Hills 2010). Moreover, there are several books tracing aspects of the journalism and politics of Rupert Murdoch (McKnight 2012; Barry 2013; Tiffen 2014).

These rich qualitative histories offer us narratives of progress and conflict, focusing on moments of great decision, on individual motives and actions, and on dramatic effects, intended and unintended. This book approaches newspaper history in a different way. It uses quantitative data to examine changes in the patterns of newspaper content. Some changes are sudden and stark; others are gradual, and because they become part of our taken-for-granted environments, they tend to remain invisible or unacknowledged.

In the various editions of his General Psychopathology published between 1913 and 1946, Karl Jaspers treats Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalysis in an increasingly critical vein. His 1931 cultural-philosophical essay Man in the Modern Age goes so far as to condemn Freud's theory as a dubious ideology, and after 1945 Jaspers attacks its basic tenets once again in polemical articles. In the postwar years, the famous philosopher informs us that he had already put up “inner resistance” to psychoanalysis as a young psychiatrist and that this had been for reasons that transcended purely scientific matters. What Freud had attempted to establish through the “medium of science,” Jaspers perceived from early on as a “reprehensible” philosophy, one that he aimed to challenge even in his later years with “ideas of a completely different origin.”

Commencing around 1913, Jaspers's critique of psychoanalysis was in fact relatively benign, expressing appreciation for the field as an innovative element of descriptive hermeneutics in psychiatry. In the second edition of his General Psychopathology (1920), meanwhile, the youthful philosopher changes course. Freud is no longer a trustworthy proponent of the psychology of understanding introduced by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in the nineteenth century. In contrast to his early sympathies with psychoanalysis and his initial interest in its techniques of resistance and transference, Jaspers now calls for a symmetrical relationship between patient and physician. The psychoanalyst should not dominate the existential aspects of this communicative encounter by claiming scientific authority over the self-understanding of the person suffering from psychological problems. Further, during this period Jaspers rejects Freud's accentuation of sexuality as the etiological backbone of his theory of neurosis and comes to associate psychoanalysis, pejoratively, with fin-de-siècle culture more broadly.

General Psychopathology of 1946 was written during the war, while Jaspers and his Jewish wife, Gertrud, were subject to political persecution and forced to withdraw conspicuously from public life. The former professor of philosophy at Heidelberg University now developed a more philosophical criticism of psychoanalysis, giving existential self-reflection pride of place in his conception of psychopathology and banishing psychological hermeneutics to the symptomatological periphery.

It is well known that Jaspers drew lifelong inspiration from the social and political thought of Max Weber, his close friend at Heidelberg until Weber's death in June 1920. After beginning a training in psychiatry in 1906 and publishing an influential textbook on the discipline in 1913, Jaspers gravitated toward a career in philosophy over the course of World War I, dedicating his début work of philosophy, Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (1919) to Weber, who in turn cited the work in his famous 1920 “Preface” to “The Economic Ethics of the World Religions.” A regular guest at Max and Marianne Weber's salon on the Ziegelhäuser Landstraße from around 1910 onward, Jaspers would invoke Weber's name throughout his life, including most explicitly in a commemorative address in 1920, delivered a month after Weber's death, as well as in a later homage to the sociologist, published in 1932.

An initial interest of Jaspers's lay particularly in Weber's writings on concept formation in the social sciences, which attracted Jaspers as potential tools for the analysis of psychopathological phenomena; and there is even a possibility that Weber's term verstehende Soziologie may have owed something to Jaspers's conception of verstehende Psychologie in his 1913 guidebook on psychiatry. Reading Weber in essence as an existential philosopher, Jaspers took from Weber the central proposition that science and the intellect are not in a position to impart meanings of life but may nonetheless offer “means of selfreflection” as disciplines of thought—the value of reason in this sense being to prepare the individual for commitments of a nonrational kind. Rational analysis is the springboard for existential philosophy, enabling the thinking self to make the leap into forms of nonrational “illumination of existence,” each time by pushing different value-laden commitments to the point of utmost critical scrutiny.

Unmistakably documented in his texts, Jaspers's relationship to Weber is most evident in the abovementioned writings as well as in the first of the three volumes of Jaspers's main treatise on philosophy of 1931–32, entitled “Philosophical World-Orientation.” In particular, the Weberian roots of Jaspers's thinking about “limit situations” and nonrational value commitments have long been elaborated by scholars—among others notably by Dieter Henrich, Ernst Moritz Manasse and Joshua Derman.