Fuyuki Kurasawa unearths what he terms "the ethological imagination," a substantial countercurrent of thought that interprets and contests Western modernity's existing social order through comparison and contrast to a non-Western other. Kurasawa traces and critiques the writings of some of the key architects of this way of thinking: Jean-Jaques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Michel Foucault.