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 a new kind o f newness) follows from this
duality. Whatever else the project of the 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.