Slavoj Zizek: What does it mean to be a revolutionary today? Marxism 2009

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GD69Cc20rw

An intriguing definition of modernity (at 33:51 minutes): "Modernity is when Descartes says, 'The beginning of my philosophy was: First I was an idiot and laughed at others, other cultures. Then I asked myself: But what if my customs are in the same way idiotic for the others' view (...)?' This is the beginning of modernity, European modernity, to experience your own cultural background as something ultimately contingent, irrelevant and so on.

I would like to trace that phenomenon through the last several hundred years of history.