126 Habermas: An intellectual biography
a search that would occupy him with the formal properties of
language throughout the 1970s.16 4 Thus, in a work published before
the denouement of the student movement, themes central to his
1981 theory of communicative action are clearly present: among
them, the notion of domination-free communication as the norma-
tive foundation for critical social theory. The “universal pragmatics”
of language he outlined in the 1971 Gauss lectures are a foundation
stone for the edifice of the TCA. In TCA, ideology is understood
as “... systematically distorted communication.”^165 To understand
this concept entails understanding its opposite: “rational” or “non-
distorted” communication. As two scholars explained in 1980,
That we have some such idea is precisely what the programmme of
“universal pragmatics” seeks to show. By reconstructing the condi-
tions of possible communication, Habermas [hoped]... to identify
the elements necessarily presupposed in the successful exchange of
speech-acts and thereby to uncover “the universal validity basis of
speech.”^166
Elaborated over the course of the decade, the fundamental insights
of “universal pragmatics” culminated in a theory of justice as fair-
ness of communication.^167 Habermas’s appropriation of John Austin’s
theory of “speech-acts” for his universal pragmatics is summarized
as follows:
[Habermas argues that]... in uttering a speech act, the speaker
unavoidably raises “validity claims” which can only be “redeemed”
in a discourse having the structure of an “ideal speech situation.”
However distorted the actual conditions of communication may be,
every competent speaker possesses the means for the construction(^164) See Habermas, Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen
Handelns (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1984 ).
(^165) David Held and John B. Thompson, eds., Habermas: Critical Debates
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982 ), 8. There is a continuity here with
Habermas’s Knowledge and Human Interests ( 1968 ).
(^166) Ibid.
(^167) For the elaborations, see Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Theorie des
kommunikativen Handelns (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1984 ) and
a partial translation of it in Habermas, On the Pragmatics of Social
Interaction: Preliminary Studies in the Theory of Communicative Action, trans.
Barbara Fultner (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001 ). “Was heisst univer-
sal Pragmatik?”[1976] is translated in Habermas, Communication and the
Evolution of Society.