60 SOCIAL SCIENTIST through scientific discourses and state institutions. However, in the last phase of this life Foucault turned towards an explicit appreciation of the 'ethos of Enlightenment1 which he saw as a construction of a 'critical ontology of ourselves as a historico-practical test of the limits that we may go beyond, and thus as work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings'. To Foucault, this practical-ethical dimension of a critical philosophical life entailed 'faith in Enlightenment' as well as faith in the possibility of creating ourselves as autonomous beings.1 Thus paying homage to the possibility of historicising ethical critiques of a post-Kantian variety while also invoking the romantic belief in autonomy as an ideal, Foucault prudently recognises his own location within the edifice of modernity as a philosophical horizon that enables both critiques and improvements—however local and specific. In spite of these qualifications from the late Foucault, the tendency towards construction of modernity as a somewhat caricatured theoretical Other has become something, of a trademark among many subsequent users of Foucault's theoretical language. This can be observed e.g., in the frequent combination of the otherwise disparate, though not unrelated, theoretical languages of hermeneutics, positing a historicist time space bound character of categories and intellectual horizons, and post-structuralism positing a 'higher order', often quasi-transcendental, reasoning on language, power and subjectivity. This combination is often held together only by an ostensibly common denominator, namely the critique of 'modernity-as-universalist reason'. The argument I wish to make here is that critiques of 'modernity-as-' universalist reason1 inadvertently tend to move upon an already densely structured field of historical discourses and philosophical traditions, notably romanticist philosophies of language and culture, which opposed and in many ways constructed the notion of 'modemity-as-universalist reason1 already from the latter half of the eighteenth century. One may argue that if western intellectual history is marked by an emergent episteme bent on universalist reason, the same history is also marked, and enriched, by the existence of another, though weaker, romanticist episteme. This latter episteme posits knowledge and meaning as being culturally differentiated, as always mediated by a specific language, as always situated in unique historical settings. It presupposes a fundamental culturalist ontology, positing human beings and human subjectivity as, first and foremost, being produced within discrete and distinct cultural horizons of meaning. The romanticist episteme marks in a certain way the final breakthrough of modernity as a cultural system as it for the fist time posits originality and notions of autonomy and self grounding of human beings, cultures and social forms as marks of the highest cultural and political value. If modernity as a cultural system of secularised thought fundamentally is