Abstract
The religio-political nexus: Historical and comparative reflections Johann P. Arnason The chapter begins with comments on Willfried Spohn's approach to the comparative study of religion and politics.
He linked this field to the problematic of multiple modernities and the civilisational frame of reference. Continuing that line of inquiry, the chapter builds on S.
N. Eisenstadt's analysis of the "civilisational dimension of human societies", understood as the intertwining of cultural articulations of the world and institutional frameworks of social life.
Religious traditions play a key role in this context, and their impact on the political arena - the religio-political nexus - is crucial. Sacral rulership was the archetypal form of this nexus, but it underwent different changes in different parts of the world during the period known as the Axial Age, around the middle of the last millennium BCE.
A comparative analysis of these transformations will help to put the relationship between religion and politics (highlighted by Louis Dumont several decades ago, but later neglected) back into the study of this era and its legacies.