There are abstractions in the history of science and philosophy. These abstractions are thinking possibilities developed to analyse phenomena more easily at the mental level. One of the first examples of this that comes to my mind is Karl Marx 's much-discussed abstraction of infrastructure-superstructure. In the Preface to his famous work, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1979: 23-26), Marx writes that essentially economic production determines the political and ideological superstructure, that there must be some kind of harmony in the relationship between the mode of production and the productive forces, but that the breakdown of this harmony is also a necessity of the laws of history. When the harmony or balance between these relations is disturbed, the era of social revolution begins until these forces are harmonised with each other again. This harmony is, of course, achieved by producing institutions, structures and ideological discourses that are compatible...