Habermas relocated utopian potential from nature-reconciliation into the structure of language.

Evidence

By making language the basis of a utopian potential, Habermas declared talk of the `oppression’ of external nature, with which of course we cannot speak, to be an inaccurate paraphrase of a normal, unavoidable state of affairs; and he declared the idea of emancipation, of the dissolution of social relations of domination through unconstrained communication, to be a normative potential that was anchored in the structure of language. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 609

Categorization

• DEFINE: States the core Habermasian move: emancipation as normative potential embedded in language, replacing the nature dialectic.
• XREF: This is the theoretical hinge that becomes Habermas’s later theory of communicative action.