Abstract

The overall purpose of this work is threefold. First, at the most general level, I want to show that the radical critique of the pathologies generated by the development of modernity does not have to lead to the rejection of its central ideal: that the exercise of reason is essential to the attainment of emancipation from natural and social constraints. Although this ideal was shared by the great thinkers of modernity from Montaigne to Descartes to Kant, I want to argue that what can and needs to be renewed today is neither the skeptic nor the Cartesian conception of this ideal but the critical conception developed by the philosophes of the French Enlightenment. Second, I want to show how in the tradition of Critical Theory from Horkheimer to Habermas this Enlightenment ideal was renewed and extended into a general critique of material and social conditions which hindered its realization. Finally, from the perspective of this critical conception of reason, as developed more recently by Habermas, I try to answer the two-pronged challenge posed to modernity and its Enlightenment project by postmodern thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault as well as communitarian thinkers such as Alasdair MacIntyre. After pointing out historical problems, theoretical inconsistencies and normative confusions in the critiques and theories of these critics, I conclude by supporting Habermas's view that rather than abandoning the Enlightenment project what we need to understand is that modernity and its Enlightenment project can only make good its deficits by a radicalized Enlightenment. However, I also point out some problems in Habermas' theory of communicative reason that need to be corrected in order for his theory to be consistent with the revolutionary purpose embodied in the early project of Critical Theory that Habermas is explicitly pursuing