In current debates on modernity, theoretical and practical issues predominantly centred on questions about modernity's lifetime are increasingly prominent. In recent social theory, in particular, the central concern, in relation to the current phase of modernity, seems to be whether modernity is ‘exhausted’, or an ‘unfinished project’. Modernity is theorized as either dead or incomplete. Despite the oppositions between these two theoretical perspectives, both sides have understood modernity as a coherent whole. The central point that apparently drives these two theoretical perspectives is the view of modernity as coherent.

Modernity is explained as representing, over the last two centuries or so, a single, uniform, coherent world (see Kolb, 1986). It is for this reason that modernity can be conceptualized either as reaching its end or as an incomplete project. These are the conclusions to which ‘postmodernism’ and ‘modernism’ have thus far arrived. In other words, reading modernity as a coherent whole has led some observers, on the one hand, to conclude that modernity is a dead end, while, on the other hand, others reconstruct modernity as the incomplete project of Enlightenment.

It is no accident that the debate between Habermas and Lyotard has become a vantage point for observing the tensions between the two central theoretical perspectives on modernity in recent years. These two central theoretical perspectives, namely postmodernism and the defence of Enlightenment modernity – perhaps better termed ‘the defence of modernism’ – agree as to the coherence of modernity, despite their different understandings of this coherence. It is because of this assumed coherence of modernity that both perspectives have attracted supporters. In other words, it is easier to argue for or against modernity when modernity is viewed as a coherent whole. Once modernity is defined as a totality – rational, ethical and so on – it becomes impossible to think about any alternative perspective beyond its rejection or defence. If modernity is thought of, for example, as a totalizing logic on the basis of instrumental rationality, one would have to view it as a dark age, causing the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Chernobyl, and so on. This is so because if an epoch is fundamentally unifying, and unified, there cannot be any way of talking about it other than marking it as a destroying or dehumanizing epoch.