<p>Although Husserl’s theory of essence has recently emerged as historically important, it has not been deemed useful to contemporary essentialism. Many essentialists nowadays propose to reduce metaphysical modality to the essences of things. They are accordingly tasked with explaining why essence generates modality in the required way. It is widely believed, however, that Husserl has a modal account of essence and is thus unable to contribute to such a project. Against this consensus, I show that Husserl’s theory of essence contains resources for safeguarding a promising recent proposal to meet this explanatory challenge, viz., the proposal to model essence in terms of <i>generalized identity</i> and to establish its necessity by appeal to the necessity of identity. Recently, Jessica Leech (2021) has challenged this proposal on grounds that, because identity inherits its necessity from the <i>logical</i> necessity of self-identity, it collapses the necessity of essence into logical necessity. To this extent, it appears to make the latter do all the work in accounting for metaphysical necessity, obviating the need for an essentialist account of modality in the first place. I argue that Husserl has something approaching an account of essence as generalized identity and that his account contains resources for defusing Leech’s challenge. If I am right, then Husserl’s essentialism, when combined with certain Husserl-independent theoretical commitments, offers a live and potentially fruitful resource for the contemporary project of reducing metaphysical modality to essence.</p>