here is Stephen Eric Bronner's case for the enlightenment project (via philosophy.com), ironically in the same issue of logos online as Habermas' case for the kantian project.

"Horkheimer and Adorno offered not simply the critique of some prior historical moment in time, but of all human development. This made it possible to identify enlightenment not with progress, as the philistine bourgeois might like to believe, but rather—unwittingly—with barbarism, Auschwitz, and what is still often called “the totally administered society.”

Such is the picture painted by Dialectic of Enlightenment. But it should not be forgotten that its authors were concerned with criticizing enlightenment generally, and the historical epoch known as the Enlightenment in particular, from the standpoint of enlightenment itself: thus the title of the work. Their masterpiece was actually “intended to prepare the way for a positive notion of enlightenment, which will release it from entanglement in blind domination.”4 Later, in fact, Horkheimer and Adorno even talked about writing a sequel that would have carried a title like “Rescuing the Enlightenment” (Rettung der Aufklärung).5 This reclamation project was never completed, and much time has been spent speculating about why it wasn’t. The reason, I believe, is that the logic of their argument ultimately left them with little positive to say. Viewing instrumental rationality as equivalent with the rationality of domination, and this rationality with an increasingly seamless bureaucratic order, no room existed any longer for a concrete or effective political form of opposition: Horkheimer would thus ultimately embrace a quasi-religious “yearning for the totally other” while Adorno became interested in a form of aesthetic resistance grounded in “negative dialectics.” Their great work initiated a radical change in critical theory, but its metaphysical subjectivism surrendered any systematic concern with social movements and political institutions. Neither of them ever genuinely appreciated the democratic inheritance of the Enlightenment and thus, not only did they render critique independent of its philosophical foundations,6 but also of any practical interest it might serve."

The insufficiencies of Adorno/Horkheimer in terms of social and political action are well understood. Indeed one could say that they haven't got further than what Marx referred to as "sensuous human activity, practice" in his Feuerbach theses. To the current generation of critical theorists this points to the requirement of a categorical frame of analysis, which doesn't merely describe social power structures, but also contains a normative aspect about the social processes required to overcome them. Bronner however, seems to argue that this lack of normative instruction somehow points to a rehabilitation of enlightenment ideals, as understood in opposition to the counter-enlightenment, which in turn seems to be a conservative critique of liberalism. This seems a bit quick indeed, and strangely unrelated in the way he presents it. He doesn't actually seem to engage the first generation of critical theory, as much as he is regressing past them into a pre-Hegelian state of ahistorical affirmation, lastly in order to defend the liberal pretence which Adorno/Horkheimer have exposed.

This truly feels like a reduction of critical potential. At best, it seems to allow for a liberal concept of justice with a set of normative criteria to articulate social injustices, however, without questioning the institutional embeddedness of these criteria in a particular type of society. Criticism no longer seems to be understood as a reflective moment of a rationality that is rooted in the historical process. Doesn't this blind the idea of capitalism as being a cause for the transformation of social rationality, or even, eclipse the notion of instrumental reason altogether?

And how about Habermas' Kantian "project" in international constitutionalism? Isn't this "project" ignorant of how Kantian idealism essentially reified Protestant morality and economic rationality in the institutions of the rising bourgeoisie? Can we afford to ignore Hegelmarxist objections in our discourse of modernity?

there seems to be a lot of this around these days, usually with 911 mentioned in the first paragraph...