ABSTRACT
In the burgeoning debate over the apparent arrival of the postmodern era (or over the implications of a discourse that claims such an era has arrived), no contributor has been as forthright and unflinching a defender of the still uncompleted project of modernity as Jürgen Habermas. In several recent works, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne, Die neue Unübersichtlichkeit, and his response to the essays collected by Richard Bernstein in Habermas and Modernity,1 he has expanded his critique far beyond the first, tentative essays he published in the early 1980s.2 These initial efforts, in part because of their imperfect command of the French intellectual scene and in part because of their controversial attribution of a conservative political implication to postmodernism, proved a lightning rod for criticism. In many quarters, Habermas was pilloried as a naively one-dimensional celebrant of an outdated liberal, Enlightenment rationalism. His attempt to formulate a theory of social evolution was damned as a new version of a discredited objectivist philosophy of history.
