Habermas held modernity unfinished yet irreversible, needing protection from market and bureaucracy.

Evidence

The project of modernity had yet to be realized. But the outright attempt to negate it — a counsel of despair — had failed. The autonomy of the value-spheres could not be rescinded, on pain of regression. The need was still to reappropriate the expert cultures each had produced into the language of common experience. For this, however, there must be barriers to protect the spontaneity of the life-world from the incursions of market forces and of bureaucratic administration. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 86

Categorization

• DEFINE: Crisply states Habermas’s core position: modernity incomplete but non-negotiable, requiring reappropriation of expert cultures into the life-world.