| This thesis examines Jurgen Habermas's thought on modernity in a series of encounters designed to address the general topics of ethics, time, and language. Chapter one investigates the role of the term ethos in the Foucault/Habermas debate, and elaborates on Foucault's assertion that modernity is not a singular discourse but an ethical attitude assumed against attitudes of countermodernity. The thesis adopts Foucault's insight by reading Habermas's version of the cultural history of modernity for its vision of historical time (chapter 2) and its model of linguistic intersubjectivity (chapter 3). These latter chapters offer a reading of early modern English literary culture in general, and the satire of Jonathan Swift in particular, in order to conclude that Habermas's telling of the history of modernity as the emergence of a singular, ideal mode of public and political discourse understates the role of contingency, invention, uncertainty, and pluralism in modernity.;Keywords: Swift, Foucault, Habermas, modernity, countermodernity, discourse, ethics, enlightenment, public sphere. |
