Politics and Mikhail Bakhtin's Notion of Language

In the previous chapter, I discussed the pragmatist concept of democracy as grounded in the idea of the community of communication. Mead and Dewey painstakingly demonstrated the connections between the self, communication (mainly, although not exclusively, through language) and democratic politics. Mead, especially, developed a concept of language, which posits language as a kind of action. Yet, he did not explore the inner structure of linguistic communication, which omission has been frequently cited as a serious flaw of his theory. For instance, Habermas made this failing into a focal point of his critique of Mead's theory. Habermas proposes that Mead's concept of language should be supplemented with Wittgenstein's insights:

What is of greatest importance for Habermas is ‘the sameness of meaning’, which is supposed to secure the ultimate understanding between the parties involved in dialogue. As there is not the space to discuss Habermas's concept of language in detail at this point, I would like only to note that his notion of language-in-action is, in fact, a disguised form of language-as-system. This scheme enables Habermas to reinterpret pragmatism as an undeveloped version of his idea of transcendental pragmatics. The gist of his interpretation lies in showing that what the pragmatists described as language communication, through subsequent operations of taking the role of the other, can be represented as universal principles, and that these principles can be deductively derived from the rules of transcendental pragmatics.