The Frankfurt School never grounded its critique in language’s truth claims

Evidence

But although this idea was central to the Dialectic of Enlightenment and to Adorno’s work, it was not intended to be a strict negation of a claim to truth and reason that had its roots in language. Language’s claim to truth and reason was not the central point from which Critical Theory fed. The correspondence does not give any hints on whether Horkheimer and Adorno consciously rejected the idea of a `critique of language’ (seen as a subjective genitive) while they were working together on the dialectics book or, if so, why. They may have rejected it because to argue on the basis of a demand, based in language, for truth and for an association of free human beings seemed to Horkheimer to be too idealistic. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2168

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader question of why Critical Theory differs from later linguistic turns (e.g. Habermas, Foucault, Wittgenstein).
• QUESTION: Why did Horkheimer regard a language-grounded demand for truth as ‘too idealistic’? Worth tracing to its source.