Our context is that of the modern transition as the 'great transformation', and this in the context of the eonic sequence, a 'next axial interval', so to speak, with its characteristic frontier effect, three century duration, divide, and aftermath. This frontier effect is completely insidious and bedevils all efforts at clarity as the red herring of Eurocentrism enters to confound what is a stage of globalization, eonic globalization, we must note at once. The localization via a narrow spectrum in a partition created by the Reformation, stretching along a band comprising, roughly, the brief Italian, then the German, Dutch, English, thence French, Spanish, etc, transition zones, confounds easy analysis as hopeless confusion emerges about 'European Western Civilization'.  Crediting this 'frontier effect' seems an indulgence in the fantastic, and an uphill struggle of understanding unless we see its greater logic and the way it banishes all confusions, seen rightly. Localization and instant globalization are the elegant if rambunctious result. The spectrum of effects comprises, to be brief, the Protestant Reformation, the German social revolution, thence the rise of modern science, the phase liberal emergentism seen in the English Civil War, the sidewinder emergence of the North American system, suddenly triggered at the Great Divide as a parallel emergence zone (the first of the diffusion field offspring). The Enlightenment, Romantic reaction, great divide, and democratic and industrial revolutions cascade at the climax in a confusing interplay that can't be understood if they are too easily scrambled together as a causal series (the industrial revolution didn't cause democracy, or vice versa). We have independent emergentist processes compressed in a field of manifestation. We see that the modern transition in one of its climaxes in the earthquake of the French Revolution, but it should be noted that our transitions are 'shotgun' in their action, and the apparent failure of the French revolutionary instance might blind us to the overall success of the transition in generating a remarkable string of democratic revolutions, whose natural tendency toward equalization generates the action of radicalizing leftisms. 

We have the spectacle of the discrete freedom sequence, in the larger eonic context: the realization that the periodization of democratic emergence is not random, but follows eonic logic. This demands a partition into macro and micro analyses, and the fact must be faced that the burden of realization will, and must, end in the field of the post-transition, the micro field.  This rapid downshifting must be understood in any attempt to analyze the outcome of the modern transition and certainly the coming left(s). The danger of sudden appearance of idiocy squared is a liability of such a process, and more generally the integrated transformational character of the transition is not given to what follows in its wake. Subsequent movements might therefore be subject to the limitations of dialectical confusion and deviation from unknown or invisible premises latent in the larger action of the eonic sequence. 

We might note in this regard that the fruits of the transition produce very quickly something not present in the transition itself, the rewriting of modernity as an economic civilization in the phase of industrial capitalism. All well and good, but the restriction of a larger potential is, significantly, protested at once by the remnants of the French Revolutionary left, remorphing rapidly into challengers of that first born outcome of the modern transition. 

1848 does indeed seem to be a critical moment as the flood tide of the modernist post-transition gets underway in the coming of globalization. 

Top