 "Arena"'s distinctive approach can thus be seen as having some superficial similarities with post-Marxist and post-classical attempts to apply a levels analysis of social life as developed (differently) by Jürgen Habermas and Louis Althusser.Its critical account of instrumentalised abstraction also has some surface parallels with Slavoj Žižek's critique of postmodernism in "The Ticklish Subject" and "The Fragile Absolute", and Zygmunt Bauman's analysis of 'liquid modernity’ in his recent works.More generally, "Arena"’s distinctive approach is grounded in an emphasis on the constitutive role of abstraction both within the interpretive and the instrumental expression of rationality.