ABSTRACT
Habermas has always supposed that his description of modernity's ‘unfinished project’ of democratic Enlightenment indicates a real appreciation of the diversity of modernizing processes against the one-sidedness of the dialectic of Enlightenment thesis. He has wanted to expand our comprehension of the complexity of the Enlightenment's rationalizing potentials and to promote the normativity of the interactive rationality that underpins the legitimacy of democratic power against the hegemonic tendencies of an instrumentalizing reason. However, some of Habermas’ critics maintain that this attempt to widen the interpretation of its rationality potentials still fails to capture the extent of the impact of the Enlightenment. Johann Arnason, for instance, considers that an expanded account of its rationalizing trajectories is too narrow a frame within which to appreciate Enlightenment's full significance. 1 Habermas, Arnason maintains, has overlooked the on-going cultural tensions released by the legacies of Enlightenment reason that not only conflict with its original self-interpretations, but also challenge its capacity to set itself up as modernity's incomplete project. For Arnason, the Romantic structures of consciousness that are also a part of our cultural inheritances constitute such a response. A Romantic consciousness signals a determination to interrupt, not complete, the rationalizing project of modernity. It craves recognition for the beautiful uniqueness of each subject and discovers an intolerable authoritarianism in the Enlightenment's insatiable demand for reasons.
