54 SOCIAL SCIENTIST . . . Your Campagna peasants pay for the wars which the representative of the gentle Jesus is waging in Germany and Spain. Why does he make the earth the centre of the universe? So that the See of St. Peter can be the centre of the earth! That's what it's all about. You're right, it's not about the planets, it's about the peasants of the Campagna.1 A similar noble motherly compassion seems to move some of those who seek to stem the tide of the critique of the European Enlightenment emanating from the philosophical interpretations of postmodernist/poststructuralist theory. God may have been replaced by the self-reflexive subject, but the urge to defend a strategic power once appropriated through the exploits and cunning of Enlightenment 'reason' is not dissimilar to the motives of the Holy Congregation. However well-intentioned it may sometimes be, its origins include among other things an underlying Eurocentrism. It is the critical focus on the Enlightenment common to all theories labeled as postmodemist/poststructuralist, though they may diverge from each other in many significant ways, which has drawn the ire of German philosopher Jiirgen Habermas, who in his entire intellectual career has remained committed to drawing out the potential he is convinced, exists in the project of the Enlightenment for developing a more satisfying, enriching and rational organisation of society. The fact is that his faith in Enlightenment reason and the 'project of modernity', which he sees as identical with the project of the Enlightenment, seems somewhat misplaced not only in this age of decadent if not yet decaying capitalism, but even in the founding gesture of the Enlightenment as philosophical legitimation in the process of the establishment of capitalism. Moreover, his inability to find reason to take a position against US intervention in the Gulf in 1991 appears not entirely unrelated to his defence of European Enlightenment and civilization vis-a-vis the non-European world. It is not the purpose of this paper to denigrate the contributions of Habermas, particularly in view of the role he played in countering apologist interpretations of Nazism.2 In these interpretations, conservative German historians attempted to make the past acceptable by describing Nazism as an aberration and projecting socialism as the main enemy against which the West should unite. Ernst Nolle, Habermas's main opponent in the now well-known historians' debate, went so far as to define Nazism as a defensive reaction to the 'Asiatic' threat of Soviet Bolshevism. In Habermas's own words: 'The Nazi crimes lose their singularity by being made comprehensible as the answer to a Bolshevist threat of annihilation (that continues to exist today). Auschwitz is reduced to the format of a technical innovation and is explained as an 'Asiatic' peril by an enemy that is still standing outside our gates.'3