Seyla Benhabib has displayed a deeply normative concern for the origin, properties, condition and destiny of the modern world throughout her dazzling career. The great thinkers who figure so importantly in her work— from G. W. F. Hegel to the members of the Frankfurt School in Critique, Norm, and Utopia (1986), from Immanuel Kant to Hannah Arendt in Another Cosmopolitanism (2006)— drew her attention because their concerns collectively shaped the moral legacy of the Enlightenment. In the process their contributions to moral and political theory have illuminated and clarified her concern with the experience of modernity. Yet Benhabib's most direct consideration of modernity is to be discovered in the time between her early work reformulating Jürgen Habermas's effort to ground ethics in a theory of communicative action and her recent work on citizenship, multiculturalism, liberal democracy, cosmopolitan norms, and the future of the nation-state.

Two books from the 1990s capture this moment in Benhabib's career. One is her most frequently cited book, and her most forthright engagement with modernity as such: Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (1992). The other is one of her least cited books, a book dedicated to another thinker's puzzling engagement with modernity: The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (1996). Together these books provide Benhabib with a platform for her multiple, tightly linked interests at the intersection of moral, political and international theory.

Whether this platform is adequate for the load it carries is a question I address here. Playing as I do on a book title, I hope to show that Benhabib's view of modernity is ambiguous. I believe that she has erected a position that shelters her from an ambivalence about modernity that many of us feel. I would further suggest her feelings may account for, but do not excuse, her lack of concern for ‘the kind of ontological universe in which cosmopolitan norms can be said to exist’— the modern world as the only one of its kind— and undermine her efforts to show how cosmopolitan norms of justice ‘shape, guide and constrain our political life’. She is, of course, distressed by modernity's excesses and failings from a moral point of view, and behind them ‘the metaphysical illusions of the Enlightenment’, but she is convinced that modernity has within it the resources for its renovation.