ABSTRACT
The europic problematic encompasses the theory, practice and social relations of modern European universalisation. The forms that make up each of these dimensions, as seen in the previous chapter, are essentially contradictory. These contradictions are the real socio-historical presuppositions of the concrete forms actually taken by modernity. They are, for instance, the forms that provide the internal structures of modern political and social imagination, or the dominant form of the modern imaginary, the ethical economic ideologeme.1 The reproduction and transformation of modern ideologemes, however, generates a pivotal problem, raised in the opening chapter, i.e. the failure of historical reflexivity within the modern tradition. The problem is that the modern tradition is unable to understand itself, or modernity more generally, in genuinely historical terms. Instead, its theoretical practices generate and reproduce a systematic ambiguity: its categories are treated as both transhistorical universals when they are deployed as essences, and as historical specificities when deployed as actualities.2
