Here and Now
Modernity belongs to that small family of theories that both declares and desires universal applicability for itself. What is new about modernity (or about the idea that its newness is new kind of newness) follows from this duality. Whatever else the project of Enlightenment may have created, it aspired to create persons who would,after the fact,have wished to have become modern. This self-fulfilling and self-justifying idea has provoked many criticisms and much resistance,in both theory and everyday life.