ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on civilizational and regional politics. It maneuvers between two sets of claims articulated after the end of the Cold War. Francis Fukuyama’s end-of-history thesis interpreted the victory of liberalism over communism and fascism as the end of different programs for modernity and the beginning of stultifying sameness. A recognition of constrained diversities makes it easier to resist Fukuyama’s urge of imputing to history a teleology and helps discover spaces for new political possibilities that Huntington’s language of clash conceals. Eisenstadt’s core argument holds that the impact of different Axial Age religions and civilizations is eventually transmitted to one global civilization containing multiple modernities. Following Max Weber, Eisenstadt argues that the different religious cores and cultural programs of Axial Age civilizations are historically grounded, continually reconstructed traditions. The religious cores of civilizations thus continue to have a strong impact on the unending restructuring of their respective states.
