ABSTRACT
If the ambitions of the Age of the Enlightenment were high, this was because the means appeared to be at hand: the power of human reason and the application of uniquely rational procedures, in particular objective empirical scientific method, and the enormous potentials of technology and industrialization. It was these means that gave moderns the
confidence that they could progress. With the help of these powerful tools, modernity has sought to transcend place, culture and particular historical experience, and abstract the individual from his or her context. The search has been certainty secured on the foundations of universal and knowable essences, properties, laws and explanations, foundations for an ordered world that were general, timeless, decontextualized, and constituted ‘a universal canon of rationality through which human nature could be known, as well as unconditional universal truth’ (Mouffe, 1996b:245).
