ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the concerns from what the Habermas has labeled a defensive, 'particularist' cultural subgroup. A set of philosophical articulations forms the intellectual core of the agenda of the project of modernity and, for Habermas, was first problematized and connected to rationality by Hegel. The Reformation, Enlightenment, and French revolution were the key historical events that validated the agenda of subject-centered reason and signaled the triumph of the 'modern' age over the past. The universalization of norms of action and the generalization of values, which set communicative action free from narrowly restricted contexts and enlarge the field of options. The reason-derived Universalist and egalitarian aspirations of the project of modernity notwithstanding, the liberals seeking to found a nation-state, as were many Enlightenment thinkers, were particularly aware of the realities of human diversities and of their possible social and political consequences.
