In-between “Dialectic of Enlightenment” by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, and “Theory of Communicative Action” by Jürgen Habermas, language gains prominence as the main character

Abstract

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno warned that despite Enlightenment was born with the promise of providing a destination of fulfillment for reasoning, it ended up consolidating a totalizing technical rationality that made it capable of harboring, without wishing to do so, a scandalous irrationality and dehumanization. This instrumental rationality, which managed to spread across as a network in all areas of society under its dominant influence, prevented entirely the possibility of a suitable social critique; and left the Frankfurt School subjected to an ontological inconsistency since it was unable to implement that objective of criticism which was its raison d'être.

Jürgen Habermas tries to solve this paradox by proposing a broader understanding about rationality, which would give the appropriate criteria to confirm that social critique. In this way, he includes in his proposal a linguistic turn of a precise intersubjective cut by adding the concepts of speech-acts suggested by Austin. He also sets out together with those concepts, criticism criteria that had been diluted for prior philosophers.