Modernity Out of Joint: Global Democracy and Asian Values in Jürgen Habermas and Amartya K. Sen

In Modernity Out of Joint, our global age is redefined as the time in which modernity has gone "out of joint". What happens to the traditional and well-established notion of "modernity" when we can no longer rely on a single center of the world? How does our conception of rights change when confronted with the "democracy of others"? The author deals with these pressing issues through an acute survey of two widely influential paradigms of contemporary democratic theory: J. Habermas' discourse ethics and A.K. Sen's capabilities approach. In both cases, the global challenge represented by today's claim to an "Asian difference" against the Western canon motivates us to revise some fundamental assumptions of modern political anthropology. At the same time, this challenge invites us to revive the unexpressed potential still latent in the building blocks of Western thought and experience, in view of a renewed multilateral universalism.