Habermas’s linguistic turn was prefigured and dropped in a 1941 exchange

Evidence

But there was another motif that appeared in the correspondence between Horkheimer and Adorno in September 1941. Although they both mentioned it only briefly, the way they discussed it showed that the idea developed later on by Jürgen Habermasthat reason is situated in language, and that Critical Theory might seek its ultimate foundations therehung in the air for a moment without being picked up. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2156

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing which specific September 1941 letters gestured at a linguistic foundation for reason — the details could ground an article on Habermas’s intellectual debt to the founding generation.
• SEED: Article angle: the 1941 ‘might-have-been’ where Critical Theory nearly took a linguistic turn a generation before Habermas, and why it was dropped.