In the history of the West, the term ‘modernity’ refers to a profound social and political shift. But this shift did not occur from one moment to the next but through a slow process extending from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, Reformation and nineteenth-century industrialization. What typifies modernity is its capacity to break loose from tradition. The uprooting of traditional values and their replacement by laws geared towards reason; the dissolution of traditional social structures through processes of urbanization, mobility and individualization; the development of a specific form of political autonomy, taking in the individual, the public sphere and the separation of state and religion: all these things are implied by modernity, which has become the leading concept for describing the development of Western society.

The critique of modernity, which has always existed, is part of modernity itself. In a paradoxical way, critics in fact corroborate modernity, for the critique of existing conditions is itself an achievement of modern rational, scientistic and liberal thought. This means that Western modernity cannot be overhauled by the left or right. It is a system of thought in which critical voices, assailing such things as the destructive privileging of economic growth or Western modernity's advancing anonymization and distance from religion, must be regarded as contributions to the ongoing process of change and, thus, as the salvation of the project of modernity itself.