Freedom and bondage

"As historical beings we find ourselves always already in a linguistically structured life-world. In the forms of communication through which we reach an understanding with one another about something in the world and about ourselves, we encounter a transcending power. Language is not a kind of private property: no one possesses exclusive rights over the common medium of those communicative practices we share intersubjectively. No single participant can control the structure, or even the course, of processes of reaching understanding and self-understanding. How speakers and hearers make use of their communicative freedom to take yes or no position is not a matter of their discretion. For they are free only in virtue of the binding force of the justifiable claims they raise toward one another. The logs of language embodies the power of the intersubjective, which precedes and grounds the subjectivity of speakers."

Jurgen Habermas, "The Moral and the Ethical: A reconsideration of the issue of the Priority of the Right over the Good""Pragmatism, Critique, Judgment:Essays for Richard J. Bernstein pp. 38-39