One of the unexpected successes of the eonic model is the way it highlights the rise of modernity in the context of an historical dynamic, visible in the eonic effect. This model allows us to harmonize the ideas of history and evolution, and mediate the contradiction between random and teleological conceptions applied to history. The discovery of historical directionality where least expected is a by-product of eonic periodization, and the result is the depiction of the modern transition, and just as important, its 'Great Divide', or the point at which the modern transition terminates and yields to the new age of modernity as such. This property of a discrete-continuous model, its finite interval transformations in a series, finds a surprising confirmation in the facts of modern history, the extraordinary period of innovation that we see at the end of the eighteenth century. The model distinguishes carefully between the so-called macro and micro levels of the eonic sequence, and this, applied to the modern transition and its aftermath, suddenly uncovers the enigma of modernity in its often confusing and seemingly contradictory aspects: after the divide period the action changes its character from macro to micro. The transitional interval from ca. 1500 to 1800, from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, is climaxed by the generation of the French, American, and Industrial Revolutions, and a host of other so-called 'eonic emergents', and the result is a spectacular take-off point, the generation leading up to the period of the transformed mid-nineteenth century world of liberal/bourgeois civilization. That these events in a massive cluster from ca. 1750 to 1850, the Great Divide, are an aspect of the 'non-random (eonic) evolution' of civilization is, at first, surprising, and a strange way to analyze both history and modernity, but the match of the model to the facts is so striking that we gradually begin to get a sense of a tremendously subtle and deep system at work, one that resolves the chronic confusions of historical determinism and free history that have bedeviled all efforts to construct universal histories. Even if one found the eonic model a bit odd it would be worth one's while to get this kind of analysis under one's belt, because this kind of systems analysis, however outlandish at first, uncovers something less organized approaches would miss completely.  

The appendix of World History And The Eonic Effect constructs a periodization database using a special terminology, and in this context the term '1848+' is simply one way of referring to the Great Divide period, or rather its immediate aftermath, clearly visible in the generation of the 1840's and after. This period is, ironically, the theatre of one of the classic failed revolutions, that of 1848, but one that left a mysterious question mark, and thus the 1848+ glyph is a topical notation serving to force a question on us: how should we take the phenomenon of revolution, and ideology, in the context of the eonic model. More generally we should look at the whole outcome of the modern transition in its many dimensions and the way the nineteenth century comes to floodtide at the onset of globalization. The generation of the 48's shows a host of other parallel incidents of interest, but we can focus on the moment of emergent Marxism at the conclusion to the modern transition. 

Actually, while most so-called scientific approaches to history attempt to ape the objectivity of the hard sciences even as they end in ideological bias, the eonic model makes no pretense to transcend ideology, doing ideology wholesale, and keeps itself honest by forcing the issue of looking at the full spectrum of ideologies. The Axial Age alone shows us a multiplicity of differing perspectives and views on a stupefying scale, each hard to fully understand without a full-scale scholarly expedition. Thus we (can optionally as an exercise of post-eonic analysis) actively reconstruct the classic collision of liberal and post-liberal ideologies as this occurred instantly in the wake of the French Revolution, hoping to find some tactic of reconciliation between them, and some resolution of the immense tragedy emerging from leftist promotion of revolutionary adventurism. We should note at once, without conservative or reactionary bias, that the eonic model puts a high premium on basic liberalism as an eonic emergent process, and the reason for this is that it correlates exactly with the eonic structure, and cascades with the coming of the multiple democratic revolutions that proceeded in parallel to the leftist 'deviations' attempting spastically to both fulfill them and overcome them. Marx or no Marx, the liberal revolutions outstripped their far leftist competitors, for reasons not hard to uncover, given a little eonic study. Liberal emergentism has solid roots in the seventeenth century, and crystallizes rapidly in the so-called Great Divide. That said, there is nothing mysterious in the basic impulse of the nineteenth century left: democracy means just that, how to bring 'real democracy' into existence? Thus the rise of the left is simply an aspect of one and the same liberal revolution, a point often lost in the fractious dialectic it generated. By the time this impulse reaches the throes of Leninism the point has been lost totally, and the basics of liberal emergentism look to have been right from the beginning. The basic problem is that while the eonic sequence looks to be 'revolutionary' indeed, the series of eonic transitions are not the same as 'revolutions', which are particular historical episodes that occur in the context of eonic transformation, but don't represent its essential dynamics. Thus the spectre of  teleological revolutionism arose as a fallacy of eonic dynamics, and the result was a misconception of the case at hand. 

Of essential interest is the now classic set of antitheses that emerge between the liberal and later leftist, especially Marxist, perspectives. It was Marx who first clearly outlined the issues of theory and ideology, in the context of revolutionary transformation and its dilemmas. And yet something has always seemed 'not right' about Marxist theory and the tremendous surging emergence of liberal civilization was never properly analyzed or resolved in the tenets of the suddenly-itself-an-ideology: the Marxist interpretation of historical dynamics. 

The  eonic model forces a kind of 'recompute' on these questions, since it makes a strong, and finally much better, claim on historical theory than the heavy-footed 'historical materialism', whose analyses have never been successful in their theoretical claims, what to say of their fallacious attempts to rationalize the phenomenon of revolution, witness the fiasco of the Bolshevik revolution and its aftermath. 

The eonic model, it must be admitted, with whatever bias, gives a much sounder analysis of so-called 'bourgeois modernity', but  perhaps risks the danger of itself being ideological in this respect. In fact, the model is so comprehensive that it can table contradictions with ease, and its intent is reconstructive study, not ideological promotion.  But the leftist rejection of bourgeois capitalism led to the rejection, in some respects, of the whole phenomenon of modernity itself, in the confusion of economic and cultural categories, thus ending in a kind of proto-postmodern muddle of trying to undo the very culture it was trying to promote. The crux of the confusion lies in the mis-analysis of the French Revolution, and the so-called 'economic interpretation of history' applied to the dynamics of capitalism. The  irony here is that by putting the prime emphasis on economic dynamics the Marxist left ended by strengthening the very process it attempted to critique. Whatever else is the case, and beyond the phantoms of theory,  the left, the issue of revolution apart, provided an answer to the deficit of democracy in its successful practical realization of nineteenth century labor movements attempting to redress the imbalance not only in bourgeois democracy but in the whole history of exploitation visible since the emergence of the first states at the dawn of civilization. A world-historical first. 

The eonic model approaches the whole question of the failed theses of historical materialism with a different construct and in a much simpler and more intuitive fashion, by distinguishing economic 'evolution' from the greater 'evolution' of culture, and demotes capitalism to economics, even as it promotes the more general phase of modernity to the level of a kind of macrohistorical dynamic. Demoting capitalism to 'mere economics' shouldn't be a controversial step! Cats belong in the feline category, nowhere else. And yet the mystique of capitalism seems to have bemused the Marxist to the point that universal history is seen as the  product of economic interactions, and this is simply a fallacy.