In recent years, the linguistic aspect of how social and political practices may condition normative political principles has been discussed. In several current debates, political theorists have been using pragmatist theories of language and meaning for normative purposes. We referred to them in Chapter 2 as ‘pragmatist political theorists’. In this chapter, we examine different attempts made by these theorists to argue for linguistic constraints on normative political principles. Linguistic constraints are understood here in a broadly semantic sense, including strict semantic as well as pragmatic aspects of language.

It is well known that Ludwig Wittgenstein's insights have had a major impact on how contemporary philosophers apprehend the role of practice for understanding and meaning. But a number of pragmatist political theorists argue that Wittgenstein teaches us lessons not only about how language functions, but also about how it delimits normative political principles. Chantal Mouffe, for example, claims that Wittgenstein's insight ‘undermines the very objective’ of aiming at universal principles and renounces mainstream liberal ‘claims to universality’ (Mouffe 2000: 73, 62). Since rules are inseparable from the form of life in which they exist, liberal democratic principles or institutions ‘do not provide the rational solution’ but are only ‘defining one possible political “language-game” among others’ (Mouffe 2000: 64). Similarly, James Tully claims that Wittgenstein's rule-following considerations and remarks about ‘family resemblance’ demonstrate the futility of ‘developing a definite theory’ (2002: 542–3). Since family resemblances among uses of a concept change over time, ‘understanding political concepts and problems cannot be the theoretical activity of discovering a general and comprehensive rule’, according to Tully (2002: 542). Even John Gunnell, who has criticised attempts to use Wittgenstein for political-theoretical purposes (1998, 2013), claims that Wittgenstein ‘subverts the search for the universality of both politics and political inquiry’ (2004: 77). He further argues that Wittgenstein's conventionalism has ‘fundamental democratic implications’. Gunnell writes: ‘If there are no transconventional standards of judgment, then the logic of some form of popular sovereignty and equality is unavoidable’ (2004: 89). Hence, for these pragmatist political theorists, a normative political theory that puts forward generally applicable universal principles of justice, democracy or political legitimacy – in their view, most mainstream liberal theories dominating the debates – is seriously misunderstanding the limitations that our different forms of life put on our theorising.