ABSTRACT
Modernity’s exceptions share a common geography. They are spatially alike in inverse proportion to the degree that they are temporally divergent. The reach of axiomodernity is not synonymous with ‘Europe’ any more than it is synonymous with ‘the West’ or with ‘Asia’ or the entirety of ‘the globe’. Janusian cognition contributes a tacit framework for the oscillating pattern of expansive economies of all kinds. The move towards generalized prosperity starts in the late nineteenth century when economic growth begins to spread across the world. A significant number of high-prosperity societies at some point in their history have experienced severe geo-political divisions and partitions. Ambidextrous cognition, a kind of intellectual double-entry bookkeeping, is regarded with suspicion, even if, as it turns out, the path to a modern prosperous society is impossible without the paradoxes that axiomodernity rests on.
