Abstract

I will criticize Habermas’ theory of modernity regarding his defense of the European modernity as basis of a universalist epistemological-moral paradigm, and of a cosmopolitan integrative project. In Habermas’ theory, decentered culture, gestated in European modernity, can base rationalized, non-egocentric and non-ethnocentric consciousness structures, with universalist comprehensiveness, affirming democracy and human rights both as epistemological criteria that are evaluative of particular contexts, and as guarantors of an embracing integrative project. Against this, I will defend that modern epistemological-moral universalism has an assimilationist logic that delegitimizes particular contexts as condition of survival of the modernity as worldwide supposedly universalist, legitimizing, thereby, european modernity itself as supreme criteria of critic and integration, in that universalism gives to modernity a reach beyond itself, also embracing non-modern contexts.