The Political Wittgenstein?

Many, if not most, efforts to broach the question of what to say about Wittgenstein when it comes to politics begin by confronting one or both of two imposing hurdles. The first is that Wittgenstein wrote little explicitly or directly about politics. He developed nothing approaching what might be considered a political theory; he rarely discussed specific political circumstances; and the scattered remarks that one of his literary executors brought together in the collection Culture and Value (see Perloff Reference Perloff and Perloff2022, 200), although clearly expressive of antipathy to conceptions of society that treat science as the measure of all things, are unsystematic in a way that may seem unpropitious for the purposes of political thinkers. The second hurdle is that Wittgenstein’s personal political utterances were, to put it diplomatically, idiosyncratic. He was, by several accounts, “a communist at heart,” an egalitarian defender of the working class (Monk Reference Monk, Flowers and Ground2018, 343 and 20–1) who exhorted kindness and social work above all else (Pascal Reference Pascal, Flowers and Ground2018, 210), and who quietly and energetically supported a number of women and non-white students and scholars (see, e.g., Berkman and Teichman, eds., 2025 and Cooper Reference Cooper1992, 89). Yet he expressed misogynist and antisemitic views (see Szabados Reference Szabados1997 and Reference Szabados1999, respectively), mocked peace activism, lauded racist and homophobic thinkers like Otto Weininger and Oswald Spengler, and, in 1946, even extolled the “salutary discovery” of the atomic bomb – albeit only out of what he admitted was a childish desire to be cleansed of the evil of the modern world (CV 1998, 55–56 [1980, 48–49]). Nearly all the scholars who have weighed in on the political bent of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, including those discussed in this Element, have at one stage asked if we’re on a hiding to nowhere trying to extrapolate a viable contribution to political thought from such a jumble – from a man whose most consistent political sentiment, arguably, was expressed like this: “Just improve yourself – that is the only thing you can do to better the world” (Monk Reference Monk1990, 213).

But the fact that the impediments are repeatedly confronted is telling. The persistence of attempts to identify a political dimension to Wittgenstein’s works, and the controversy and excitement they have generated, are a good clue that there is something to learn from Wittgenstein regarding political thought that has nothing to do with hagiography and little to do with theory. The commentators who are most perceptive about these matters have by and large recognized that what is at stake is, instead, something much more serious and overarching – a singularly significant and elusively dissentient lesson about what the world is like and what’s involved in bringing it into focus so as to know it, critique it, and transform it. It is in this sense that Wittgenstein’s work has urgency for political thought. Later in his life, Wittgenstein claimed to have developed a “new style of thinking” for approaching these fundamental philosophical issues (LCA 28), and that is what we will argue his writings offer – an original, confounding, exhausting, piecemeal, occasion-sensitive, and liberating method. A guiding thread of this Element is that this approach is difficult to catch and that, to a large extent, the confusing medley of existing takes on “Wittgenstein and politics” reflects different ways in which his style of thinking has been elided with models that are more familiar, and so less threatening.

There have been many different receptions and interpretations of the angle on political thought that emerges from Wittgenstein’s work – spanning conservatism and reactionaryism, political relativism, classical liberalism, neo-liberalism, and Marxism, through to liberatory and progressive post-Marxist and democratic politics. This Element’s approach to this literature is genealogical and critical rather than overview-driven. It tells four interwoven stories that survey and situate the most important of these different takes – their intellectual and political starting points, motivations, ways of handling and using Wittgenstein’s texts, and their stumbling blocks. It tracks how a series of influential interpretative frameworks, motivated by genuine philosophical and political anxieties, have worked to domesticate or deflect what is most unsettling in Wittgenstein’s thought. Consequently, some figures whose readings are philosophically or politically limiting receive sustained attention because of the decisive role they have played in shaping the field’s dominant images of Wittgenstein’s relation to politics. Other approaches are engaged more briefly, where they do not exert a comparable gravitational force.

In tracing this exegetical history, the present Element also makes a case for the significance of Wittgenstein’s philosophical procedures as invaluable oppositional expedients that enable us to recognize that we have immanent resources for understanding and critiquing the present age with its manifold, overlapping grievous injustices. The result is both a politically oriented companion to interpretations of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and a proposal for approaching his thought as a lens through which to better see the world and so more meaningfully act in and upon it.

The genealogical strategy this Element employs is relatively poorly represented in reflections on the history of analytic philosophy, which more typically focus on the emergence and development of clusters of ideas – say, ideas about the nature of logic, language, and categories of mind – and assign social and political factors a restricted role. No plausible account of the reception of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, much less of its implications for questions of politics, can ignore the major part played within the interpretative enterprise of social and political influences. Discussions of his thought and its political bent have, since the years just after he died, tended toward making his distinctive view of the world and of our predicament as knowers in it conform to views that are not only more established in institutions of philosophy and the broader culture, but politically more anodyne.

One guiding idea of this Element is that Wittgenstein writes against the grain of a philosophical worldview on which the world is “hard” in the sense of being in itself devoid of meaning or normative significance, and on which getting our minds around aspects of it involves stepping back from every sensitivity and shred of feeling. His work owes its continuing relevance to the sharpness and thoroughness with which it pursues versions of this outlook into domains of thought that are its supposed strongholds as well as areas that might appear inoculated from it. Yet, confoundingly, interpreters who address the bearing of his thought on political matters often represent him as favoring versions of views of the sort he is concerned to shake off or, at times, as favoring negations of these views that bear the imprint of their originals as afterimages. The result is a trend toward distorting, or even suppressing altogether, the philosophical orientation of the political Wittgenstein, a thinker who is, in the first instance, an original and crushingly focused critic of modernity.

This trend began dramatically in the 1950s, during the initial reception of Wittgenstein’s later writings. Outspoken philosopher Ernest Gellner argues that Wittgenstein was keen to challenge the credentials of any substantial criticism of inherited social practices and that his work should be set aside on the grounds of being dangerously reactionary. The seeds for Gellner’s attack had been planted by precursory critiques from Bertrand Russell, Karl Popper, and David Pole, and it was rendered yet more plausible by convergences between its core interpretative assertions and those made by admiring students of Wittgenstein. After Gellner, other philosophers, prominently JC Nyíri, would make more measured, independent cases for thinking Wittgenstein’s philosophy trended conservative. Still, it is Gellner’s acerbic assault that would exert the most influence. For this reason, the current Element’s first section opens with a description of the impact of Gellner’s interpretation, how it affects other contemporaneous approaches to texts of Wittgenstein’s, and how the ripple effects of these interpretative maneuvers persist up until the present. The image of Wittgenstein’s work that Gellner helped to implant in the public imaginary is one of an irresponsibly stymying and esoteric quietism. This image has proven surprisingly stubborn.

Subsequent sections of this Element also proceed thematically, in each case identifying and tracing the development of influential approaches to questions about “Wittgenstein and politics.”

Section 2 explores an abiding image of the political significance of Wittgenstein’s philosophy that shares crucial similarities with views of him as a conservative thinker. This second set of readings is helpfully brought under the heading “relativism.” According to a variety of influential readers, Wittgenstein’s organizing idea was that the things we can meaningfully and justifiably say are determined and limited by our culturally specific practices and language-games. Our claims to know what the world is like and how to transform it, along with objections we lodge to such claims, can only attain justification in a manner that refers and is relative to our culture’s language-games. Both support for and condemnation of moral and political views expressed in terms of cultures considered “outside” of one’s own are rationally defective and illegitimate, according to this Wittgenstein. Although the term “relativism” is contested, the essentials of this reading have been espoused not only by critics but by prominent champions of Wittgenstein, including Norman Malcolm and Richard Rorty, the latter of whom famously holds that this posture, far from obliging us to regard cultures as hermetically sealed, opens up transformative political possibilities. Yet this set of readings, too, like those canvased in Section 1, wrongly tie Wittgenstein to a view of the world as “hard” and distort his concerns as a political and cultural critic.

An additional family of initially independent, yet complementary approaches to the significance of Wittgenstein’s work for politics, taken up in Section 3, started to develop in the mid twentieth century at Oxford and Harvard. The impetus for the unorthodox Oxford reception of Wittgenstein’s philosophy was the work of Wittgenstein’s student Elizabeth Anscombe. Also significant was Anscombe’s friend and colleague, Iris Murdoch. Together, Anscombe and Murdoch (as well as, to a more limited extent, their friend and colleague Philippa Foot) promulgated an oppositional vision of Wittgenstein as holding forth the promise of a fundamental reorientation in ethics. The congenial approach to Wittgenstein’s philosophy that grew up around Harvard in the 1960s, sometimes dubbed the “new Wittgenstein” (Crary and Read Reference Crary and Read2000), owes its biggest debt to Stanley Cavell. Cavell challenged conservative and relativist appropriations of Wittgenstein and developed an insightful approach to Wittgenstein’s later writings. The Philosophical Investigations, in particular, is, for Cavell, a series of efforts to illuminate obscured mutual attunements partly constitutive of our ordinary uses of language. Wittgenstein offers a constellation of critiques of the idea that the world can be brought into view whilst bracketing these attunements, and he asks us to radically rethink an epoch-defining understanding of reason’s claims. A pivotal Wittgensteinian moral, on Cavell’s telling, involves both the terrible fragility of language and the glorious potential for radical transformation that attunements constitutive of it afford. Cavell’s liberatory image of the philosophy of Wittgenstein, which features an original conception of the nature and difficulty of democratic community, provides inspiration for ensuing treatments of Wittgenstein and politics. Hanna Pitkin takes her cue from Cavell when, in 1972, she writes the first book-length political commentary on Wittgenstein’s philosophy and highlights liberating motifs. And Cora Diamond, who in the late 1960s began to develop her distinctive approach to Wittgenstein, blends influences from Cavell, as well as from Anscombe and Murdoch, in ways that also evoke the idea of a liberating strain to Wittgenstein’s philosophy. The work of all these thinkers has, in different ways, been taken up by social and political philosophers, democracy theorists, social critics, feminists, and theorists of care.

A final cluster of accounts of the political interest of Wittgenstein’s thought gets presented in the work of Critical Theorists and other political thinkers persuaded that Wittgenstein’s philosophy is generative for critique and democratic theory. To capture the genesis of this internally complex tradition, this Element’s fourth and concluding section traces the neglected history of how, after a hostile reception by members of the Frankfurt School’s first generation, Wittgenstein’s later philosophy becomes, in the 1980s, a central term in debates between Frankfurt School Critical Theorists, in particular Jürgen Habermas, and French Poststructuralists, in particular Jean-François Lyotard. Wittgenstein is awkwardly annexed on both sides of these debates, which involve dramatic stagings of failed receptions of his philosophy. Responses to these failures have flowered into a set of projects in political theory that breathe life into a “new political Wittgenstein.” At times, building on the foundational work of Cavell and others, political theorists and philosophers, including James Tully and Linda Zerilli show that Wittgenstein reveals the theoretical void at the heart of liberal political theories, of sorts extolled not only by Habermas but by John Rawls, that try to secure free and rational forms of political life via grounding in supposedly unimpeachable modes of reflection. These thinkers depict Wittgenstein as enabling us to dispel the deceptive promise of such rationalistic liberalisms without indulging the proclivity toward skepticism about reason characteristic of poststructuralism. They offer an understanding of Wittgenstein’s philosophy as liberating in that – like Hannah Arendt’s – it lights up the revolutionary human potential to think and undertake “the new” (Arendt Reference Arendt2006, 1963). Wittgenstein is, they show, carving a path to a liberating prospect by inviting us to question the scientism of modernity and to exchange it for an outlook that returns our sensibilities and situatedness from their banishment as supposed scourges of reason. Simultaneously, he is urging a philosophical reorientation that brings to light ongoing challenges – covered up by rationalistic doctrines – for genuinely inclusive democratic community.

Strains of such critical and democratic Wittgensteinianism receive articulations, not only in political theory and philosophy, but in other social scientific disciplines such as anthropology and sociology. For all their variety, these projects align in registering Wittgenstein’s decisive attack on an essential premise of the modern worldview: that the world itself is a standing reserve of morally indifferent resources to be extracted, quantified, commodified, instrumentalized, and controlled. Hand in hand with this understanding of the world comes a view of philosophy’s ambit as an under-laborer to attempts to know and master this standing reserve – one which takes for granted that doing so involves bracketing the supposedly distorting effects of emotion, embodiment, and ethical sensitivity. Against this backdrop, Wittgenstein is an uncompromising iconoclast, repeatedly asking us to recognize confusions in our attempts to make sense of the world, with its grievously imperfect social and political institutions, by subscribing to such views. “The sickness of our time,” he once wrote, “is cured by an alteration in the mode of life of human beings” (RFM II 23). Here, as elsewhere, he positions us to ask how his “new style of thinking” might help to transform our mode of life and our mode of philosophizing in a manner that better allows us to understand and respond to the ever-creeping maladies and horrors of the present age.

This Element offers not only an introduction to, and guide for traversing, the long-disputed terrain of a Wittgensteinian approach to political thought, but also motivation for a new reading of the philosophy of Wittgenstein as, at its heart, political, liberating, and pressingly pertinent.

The So-Called Cult of Common Usage

In the Michaelmas term of 1911, Bertrand Russell was a lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge, who had recently finished co-writing Principia Mathematica, a monumental work on mathematical logic. When twenty-two-year-old Ludwig Wittgenstein started attending Russell’s lectures and following him back to his rooms afterward to continue arguing, Russell was, by turns, annoyed and bemused (Monk Reference Monk1990, 38–39). After a term supervising Wittgenstein, however, Russell had come to admire his young Austrian student and see in him a fit successor. Russell confided to his mistress, Lady Ottoline Morrell, that he wouldn’t “feel the subject neglected … as long as [Wittgenstein] takes it up” (Monk Reference Monk1990, 46).

Forty years later, Russell sang a very different tune. Just over a year after Wittgenstein died, Russell published a scathing rebuke of what he called the “linguistic doctrine” of his one-time student, friend, and preferred interlocutor. In “The Cult of ‘Common Usage’,” Russell sums up this envisioned methodology in one sentence. “The doctrine, as I understand it, consists in maintaining that the language of daily life, with words used in their ordinary meanings, suffices for philosophy, which has no need of technical terms or of changes in the signification of common terms.” He derides the linguistic “school” for fostering ignorance and uncritical veneration of the dicta of the “common man,” rendering philosophy a “trivial and uninteresting” series of pontifications about “what silly people mean when they say silly things” (Russell Reference Russell1953, 303 and 305).

Russell’s compact critique is striking not only for its lack of exegetical evidence (not once referring to Wittgenstein or anyone else), but for its snide tone. That Russell took Wittgenstein to be a primary exponent of the suspect doctrine can hardly be doubted, however. Russell soon became overtly ad hominem. “The later Wittgenstein … seems to have grown tired of serious thinking and to have invented a doctrine which would make such an activity unnecessary” (Russell Reference Russell and Schilpp1959, 161). For Russell, the philosophical regressiveness of the later Wittgenstein’s methodology wasn’t a function of any patently political conservatism. What Russell feared in Wittgenstein’s later work was a more nebulous, anti-scientific intellectual benightedness.

By the 1950s, philosopher of science Karl Popper, then settled in Britain, had also become a vocal critic of Wittgenstein’s (Agassi Reference Agassi2008, 337–40). Popper, whose philosophical and perhaps literal sparring with Wittgenstein in the 1940s is legendary (see Edmonds and Eidinow Reference Edmonds and Eidinow2001), complains in the year of Wittgenstein’s death about his “merely verbal solutions” to philosophical problems, which Popper warns will license metaphysical claptrap intruding into serious scientific study (Reference 78Popper1952, 282–4). Popper condensed his frustrations into a new preface to The Logic of Scientific Discovery. There, he savages “linguistic philosophy” as a retrograde defense of “commonsense knowledge” that prevents scientific growth, thereby contributing to the perverse “post-rationalist and post-critical age, proudly dedicated to the destruction of the tradition of rational philosophy, and of rational thought itself” (1959, xxvi). Again, Popper does not provide textual justification or explicitly attribute this backward position to Wittgenstein, instead presenting his barbs in the vague terms of a general “methodology” and its implications. Joseph Agassi, a then-student of Popper’s, is less circumspect about his teacher’s concern. Wittgenstein had, Agassi wrote, “repeatedly rejected explanation and advocated description only. This made his later philosophy quite conservative” (2008, 325). Popper would remark in his biography, ironically considering his own status-quo-reinforcing, anti-Marxist, liberal-capitalist political views, that “ordinary language, and with it the philosophy of ordinary language is conservative,” before adding, “in matters of the intellect … nothing is less creative and more commonplace than conservatism” (1976, 125). Popper, like Russell, found in Wittgenstein’s later work a trend toward intellectual conservatism smacking of antipathy to scientific innovation.

The earliest sustained attempt to make this charge stick arrived in 1958 with the publication of The Later Work of Wittgenstein by David Pole, the first book-length engagement with Wittgenstein’s later work. Pole had studied in London in the early 1950s under A.J. Ayer – another prominent critic of ordinary language philosophy, who, however, directed his ire at his Oxford colleague, J.L. Austin. Having apparently idolized Popper during his studies (see Agassi Reference Agassi2008, 337), Pole frames his critique of Wittgenstein in terms similar to those of his philosophical heroes. He sets out to show that Wittgenstein’s aims were “solely conservative and negative,” and that his method is “descriptive … and nothing else” (1958, 97), seeking to merely document linguistic practices while undermining the potential for critical change or new lexica (see Pole Reference Pole1958, 80–2, 96). Pole sometimes articulates this as a concern about shifting tools of analysis. In place of logic, “an ideal to which ordinary discourse more or less nearly approximates” (Pole Reference Pole1958, 29), Wittgenstein lionizes ordinary language, a “loose or telescoped equivalent of what might be said in an ideal form of language” (Pole Reference Pole1958, 11). For Pole, as for Popper, the consequence of Wittgenstein’s supposedly descriptive methodology is a conservatism that amounted to a veneration of commonsense (Pole Reference Pole1958, 99) and the “absurdity” that accompanies this (Pole Reference Pole1958, 88, 98). At this stage, a widespread belief among Wittgenstein’s critics was that his work had nothing to offer politics – that his esoteric linguistic methodology and its putative veneration of ordinary discourse was philosophically stultifying yet politically anodyne.

This changed a year later when British-Czech philosopher Ernest Gellner published a book-length anti-Wittgenstein polemic, Words and Things, the sensational work that inaugurated the allegation of political conservatism at the heart of Wittgenstein’s later work. This allegation has proven strikingly persistent, so it is worth tracing its genesis – especially as subsequent scholars to lodge the accusation follow Gellner’s lead in palpable ways.

Gellner, like Pole, had idolized Popper and Ayer. According to Gellner’s biographer John Hall, Popper became a “lodestone” (Hall Reference Hall2011, 127; see 117–28), helping Gellner to get his first job at the London School of Economics in 1949, where Popper was based, and where Gellner became friendly with Ayer. The biggest influence on Words and Things, however, was Russell. “What perhaps mattered most to [Gellner],” Hall writes, “was the encouragement of Bertrand Russell” (Hall Reference Hall2011, 303). Russell penned a laudatory introduction to Words and Things, framing Gellner’s achievement as exposing the pretensions of the “fundamental dogma” of Wittgenstein’s so-called ordinary language philosophy that he – Russell – had discerned six years previously. “Common speech is sacrosanct, and … it is impious to suppose it capable of improvement” (Russell in Gellner Reference Gellner1959, 13). The heart of Gellner’s critique, which Russell declares he is “in very close agreement with” (Russell in Gellner Reference Gellner1959, 14), is that Wittgenstein’s approach fosters “necessarily conformist and conservative conclusions” (Gellner Reference Gellner1959, 264). Throughout his book, Gellner uses the language of Russell’s critique, describing Wittgenstein as ushering in “a simple dogmatic cult of common-sense” (Gellner Reference Gellner1959, 93, 209–10).

A Political Twist

Words and Things became the object of a heated transatlantic quarrel that captured the attention of a wider reading public (Mehta Reference Mehta1961). The triggering event was the refusal by Gilbert Ryle, the editor of the then premier philosophy journal Mind, to review Gellner’s book, owing to the book’s “abusiveness” (Ryle cited in Uschanov Reference Uschanov2006). Ryle was a leading figure in the ordinary language philosophy movement and a philosophical ally of Wittgenstein’s. The disqualifying factor was that, in the text, “about 100 imputations of disingenuousness are made against a number of identifiable teachers of philosophy” (Ryle cited in Mehta Reference Mehta1961, 60). Ryle’s editorial action provided the spark for a well-laid fire.

Gellner’s book broke little new exegetical ground. Gellner depicts Wittgenstein and other “linguistic philosophers” as offering descriptions of the use of linguistic expressions in successive iterations of an argument “from a conflict between the actual use of words to the falsity of a philosophical theory” (Gellner Reference Gellner1959, 30). He claims – wrongly, we’ll see – that the operative descriptions of language-use are in the terms of a prevailing “naturalistic” or science-oriented metaphysic (Gellner Reference Gellner1959, 107f.); on this basis, he alleges that all of linguistic philosophy falters on a simplistic error.

The naturalistic metaphysic Gellner takes to be at play is a thinly described version of an outlook that, post-World War II, had established itself in British philosophy departments. During the first decade of the twentieth century, currents of Hegel-inspired idealism had been influential in Britain, only to be displaced after World War I by forms of realism that claimed knowledge must be of what is independent of the knower and that were elaborated within ethics as forms of intuitionism. A decade later, these realist doctrines were crowded out by ideas of logical positivism, the intellectual tradition developed by a group of philosophers and scientists, familiarly known as the Vienna Circle, which was led by German physicist and philosopher Moritz Schlick. British philosopher Susan Stebbing had already interacted professionally with Schlick in England and defended tenets of logical positivism when, in 1933, Ryle persuaded Ayer – at the time, Ryle’s tutee – to go to Vienna. Soon after Ayer returned, he published a positivist manifesto, Language, Truth, and Logic (1936), that became a literary event, attracting readers beyond academic philosophical circles. Its arresting thesis is that only two types of statements are meaningful, those true simply in virtue of the meanings of their constitutive terms (say, “all bachelors are unmarried men”) and those admitting of verification through physical observation. This gesture seems to oblige thinkers to repudiate as literally meaningless, all at once, the statements of theology, metaphysics, and ethics.

Regarding ethics, Ayer maintains that uses of moral terms don’t pick out worldly things and so are merely emotive pseudo-concepts. Individuals who differ about whether an action or character trait is morally good or bad are not disagreeing about a fact but expressing different noncognitive attitudes. Among moral philosophers, a consensus quickly emerged that this “emotive” view of ethics, which today is disparaged for reducing moral judgments to cries of “boo!” or “hurrah!,” is oversimplistic. In the decades after the positivist wave hit Britain, it became common for research in ethics to aim at rescuing ethical statements from the nonsensicality to which positivism seemed to consign them and at showing the possibility of rational ethical arguments.

While opposed to positivism in fundamental respects, these new projects generally preserved the assumption, entrenched in positivist thinking, that values aren’t features of the world and that identifying them isn’t in any straightforward sense a matter of discernment. This assumption, which enjoyed the status of philosophical commonsense, is the cornerstone of the stance Gellner describes as naturalistic. Like many of his contemporaries, he accepted such a stance as part of any legitimate philosophical inquiry. That Wittgenstein also accepted it appears to have struck Gellner as so unquestionable as to require no justification. Gellner may also have been influenced by the then-received, though later contested view, that Wittgenstein’s first text (the only one published in his lifetime), the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, straightforwardly espoused a positivist naturalistic metaphysic, spiced up by a quietist mysticism.

Gellnerian naturalism seems to preclude the possibility that a claim about what is the case might be normatively directive. It makes it appear reasonable to speak of a “Naturalistic Fallacy,” that is a function of making unwarranted “inferences from what is to what ought to be.” The idea of such a fallacy, often traced to David Hume, was widely embraced when Gellner was writing and remains entrenched today. Gellner’s core complaint about the practice of linguistic philosophers is that it is composed of relevantly fallacious inferences. Linguistic Philosophy moves from descriptions of how words are used to conclusions about how they ought to be used and so should be seen, he avers, as “consisting essentially of a systematic and dogmatic violation of [the naturalistic fallacy]” (Gellner Reference Gellner1959, 37).

This confused posture has a superficial appeal, Gellner explains, because it seems to enable “one to have one’s cake and eat it too” (Gellner Reference Gellner1959, 106). It makes it appear that we can help ourselves to the going naturalistic worldview without having to “suffer any of the sacrifices … necessitated by the fact that many of our doings … seem to pre-suppose non-naturalistic elements” (Gellner Reference Gellner1959, 106). So, it appears that we can be good moderns who take our worldly surroundings to be bereft of value, while complacently preserving all our established practices of thought and speech, including those moral, religious, aesthetic, and other discursive practices that represent the world as a value-rich domain of wonder. That is Gellner’s diagnosis of the supposedly false appeal of linguistic philosophy, and, in offering it, he develops a version of the general complaint about the tradition’s conservative bent that Russell, Popper, and Pole had already lodged. Gellner echoes these thinkers in declaring that the linguistic philosophy favored by Wittgenstein and others “confirms everyone in his preferred or older speech habits and their associated world view” (Gellner Reference Gellner1959, 112) and so bequeaths to us a “general, unspecific” conservatism (Gellner Reference Gellner1959, 224) – a “conceptual conservatism” (Gellner Reference Gellner1959, also 214–5).

Gellner gives this criticism a novel twist, warning of political dangers of the methods of Wittgenstein and other linguistic philosophers. He devotes a late, compressed section of Words and Things to “the implications of Linguistic Philosophy for politics” (Gellner Reference Gellner1959, 293–296), arguing that Linguistic Philosophy “is conservative in the values which it … insinuates,” adding that “it is not specifically conservative, not given to indicating the needs to conserve this or that in particular, but conservative in a general, unspecific way” (Gellner Reference Gellner1959, 196). Gellner punctuates this conclusion by returning to the remark in the Investigations in which Wittgenstein says philosophy “leaves everything as it is” (PI §124), treating this remark as encapsulating Wittgenstein’s supposedly politically and intellectually conservative bent (see Gellner Reference Gellner1959, 100; the remark is alluded to without reference seven further times).

Some scholars contest Gellner’s significance for the history of Wittgenstein scholarship (e.g., Tripodi Reference Tripodi2020, 36–41), and few Wittgenstein scholars take his work seriously today. Yet Words and Things had a demonstrably outsized influence. Gellner’s critique of Wittgenstein is still cited approvingly by some social and political philosophers (see Agassi Reference Agassi2018, esp. 247–248; Jarvie 2022, esp. 60–66; Conversi 2022, esp. 163–164). The linking of Wittgenstein’s philosophy to a nonspecific political and intellectual conservativism, often combined with the suggestion that PI §124 sums up the implications of Wittgenstein’s methodology for political thought, became an enduring legacy of the book. Many came to understand PI §124 as something like a slogan – a scandalous reversal of Marx’s declaration that, while “philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it” (Reference Marx, Engels and Marx1974 [Reference Marx, Engels and Marx1845], 123; for claims of direct Wittgenstein-Marx disagreement, see, e.g., Pilot in Adorno Reference Adorno1976, 280 n.55 and Marcuse Reference Marcuse1964, 177, n.2). PI §124 was, for decades, taken as emblematic of Wittgenstein’s alleged conservatism (Temelini Reference Temelini2015, 13–14). Numerous scholarly essays and books have been oriented toward offering more faithful readings of the remark (Gunnell Reference Gunnell2014; Vinten Reference Vinten2020, Ch3, Ch5; Read Reference Read2021, Ch4; Deegan Reference Deegan2025), yet even today, some critics mention it as evidence of “disastrous” sociopolitical implications of Wittgenstein’s work (Pearce Reference Pearce2022).

The veneer of plausibility of a Gellnerian reading of PI §124 evaporates when the remark is read in context. The remark occurs in a stretch of the Investigations, roughly PI §§89–133, in which Wittgenstein considers his own philosophical procedures. Leading up to PI §124, he notes that the language we use to reflect on philosophical problems can encode requirements so natural to us that we fail to inquire into their legitimacy or even register them. So, in philosophizing, we may become “captive” to illegitimate, self-imposed constraints (PI §115) and may wind up thinking we are recording the outlines of a phenomenon when we are “merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it” (PI §114). Against this backdrop, PI §124 calls for a philosophical practice that stays at the level of description, leaving “everything as it is,” out of the recognition that our primary problem is something about our own thought and action that we refuse to see, something that we risk further obscuring if we insist on changing things without first getting it into focus (see also BT 309e). Conceived as a matter of “assembling reminders” (PI §127) that make it possible to clear up “the ground of language” (PI §118), philosophy can free us, illuminating possibilities for thought and action that our established habits of thought and speech obscure. This liberating practice may illuminate, inter alia, previously unregistered injustices, forms of social solidarity, or modes of political engagement – though Wittgenstein himself, reasonably enough, doesn’t believe academic philosophers are in any privileged position for meaningful political involvement.

There is no textual reason to think that the confused constructive activity in philosophy Wittgenstein inveighs against, together with the liberating demolition exercises he urges, are the only philosophical activities he recognizes. “We need not hold Wittgenstein to the idea,” writes John McDowell, “that whatever our topic, there are only [these] two things for philosophy to be.” Wittgenstein gives no suggestion of excluding, say, “reflection about the requirements of justice or the proper shape of a political community” (2009, 366–367). Neither Wittgenstein’s larger set of remarks about philosophy as he practices it, nor PI §124, speaks for the cramped, conservative conception of philosophy that Gellner and others claim to find.

The years following the publication of Gellner’s book witnessed the emergence of some more thoughtful arguments for taking Wittgenstein’s philosophy to have a conservative strain. Notable is Hungarian philosopher J.C. Nyíri, who, in a series of publications starting in the mid-70s addressing both Wittgenstein’s personal political outlook and the political cast of his thought, compares Wittgenstein’s philosophy with that of conservative thinkers like Michael Oakeshott and Edmund Burke (Nyíri Reference Nyíri1976 and Reference Kristóf and McGuinness1982). Though Nyíri acknowledges Gellner as a forerunner (Reference Kristóf2016, 448), his distinctive construal of Wittgenstein’s philosophy centers on situating it in relation to these strands of European conservatism. The heart of his reading of Wittgenstein’s philosophy is a debatable account – similar, we’ll see in Section 2, to those presented by many who have presented him as a relativist – of Wittgenstein as claiming that rule-following is customary in a sense that renders it rationally inscrutable. Rule-following cannot, Nyíri declares, “be explained or justified” (Reference Kristóf and McGuinness1982, 58).

A further argument for Wittgenstein’s philosophy as conservative, and one that likewise echoes claims of readings of Wittgenstein as a relativist, was made by British sociologist David Bloor (Reference Bloor1983, Ch8 and Reference Bloor and Kusch2000). In a nutshell, Bloor argues that the later Wittgenstein gestures to social consensus but leaves its origins, power, and variability unexplained. Bloor’s project, like Nyíri’s, appeared in a setting in which, largely as a result of the efforts of Russell, Gellner et al., the idea of Wittgensteinian conservativism was often treated as an exegetical default position. The interpretative landscape hasn’t entirely shifted. Some recent scholarly efforts to show that Wittgenstein’s philosophy is politically liberating include responses to Gellner (e.g., Moi Reference Moi2017, 155–8; Robinson Reference Robinson2009, 87–114; Gunnell Reference Gunnell2014, 214–33; and Zerilli 2015, 212 and 233–234).

Gellner is engaged with the Tractatus, citing it at length in numerous passages, but he rarely quotes the Investigations. This strongly suggests either that Gellner is extraordinarily lax in his exegesis or that he is working primarily from second-hand sources. In nearly three hundred pages primarily about Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, Gellner quotes only five remarks from the Investigations (PI §§98, 124, 128, 559, 599), cites two words from two others (PI §§90, 109), and quotes only two of these remarks (PI §§98, 124) more than once. Gellner’s references are limited in scope as well as number, with all but two falling in the above-discussed portion of the text in which Wittgenstein’s focus is methodology. Gellner makes vague allusions to “language games,” “therapy,” and “form of life” – all expressions important in the Investigations – but these gestures are too careless to indicate careful interpretation. And the legitimate quotes that Gellner includes are outweighed by fabricated ones (e.g., “We speak, therefore the whole world is, and moreover it is as it has always seemed” and “things are as they are” [Reference Gellner1959, 139, 145]), misquotes, and elided quotes (e.g., “the meaning of an expression is its use,” and “meaning is use!” [Reference Gellner1959, 32, and 221]). It is fair to say that, as one reviewer observes, Gellner’s book lacks “the smell of an honest or seriously intentioned work” (Dummett Reference Dummett1960, 436; also Isenberg Reference Isenberg1961 and Warnock Reference Warnock1959). Certainly, the book’s success in generating interest cannot be chalked up to substantial scholarly credentials.

Throughout his book, Gellner’s rhetorical posture is derisive. In passages illustrating grounds for Ryle’s claims about the book’s “abusiveness,” Gellner calls linguistic philosophy the “lovechild of Wittgenstein’s messianism and Oxonian complacency” (Gellner Reference Gellner1959, 259) and says it spreads through the “indoctrination of disciples who sell their souls to the Master of the movement” (Gellner Reference Gellner1959, 186).

As subsequent sections of this Element illustrate, Words and Things would play a significant role in setting the tone for subsequent discussions of Wittgenstein’s later thought, including those bearing on questions of politics. That a slapdash publication was able to shape the reception of the Investigations speaks for holding, as Stephen Mulhall puts it, that “the need to reject or transcend [linguistic philosophy] far outweighed the capacity to provide good grounds for so doing” (Reference Cavell1994, 445). A key task for any serious treatment of the political reception of Wittgenstein’s philosophy is to understand the urgent nature of that need.

Diagnosis of a Distortion

A good starting point is the recognition that Wittgenstein does not favor the naturalistic stance that Gellner and others ascribe to him but is hostile to it. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Wittgenstein develops an outlook on which our sensibilities as speakers internally inform undistorted thought about the world. This outlook does away with obstacles that, to fans of Gellner’s naturalistic outlook and other like-minded critics of Wittgenstein, seem to speak against allowing that values are aspects of our lives and relationships and, as such, straightforwardly open to view. It contests the premise of talk of a “naturalistic fallacy” and eliminates the rationale for Gellner’s main charge against Wittgenstein and all those who go in for methods of linguistic philosophy. Because this charge is the basis for Gellner’s allegation that Wittgenstein’s philosophy is politically and intellectually conservative, the allegation is likewise groundless.

By itself, this negative point is of limited interest. Informed by an appreciation of the liberating character of Wittgenstein’s philosophical procedures, it opens the door to a more faithful exploration of the political interest of his philosophy. In the lines of his thought that Gellner and others overlook in arriving at their disparaging verdicts, Wittgenstein is working out the politically dissenting views he gave voice to throughout his life (see Hertzberg Reference Hertzberg1994). Wittgenstein counts among the twentieth-century thinkers who held that modern industrial societies were propelling humankind toward calamity. One of his characteristic tropes was opposition to notions of “progress” measured exclusively in terms of technological and scientific developments. In 1930, in a sketch for a foreword to reflections later published as Philosophical Remarks, he writes that he contemplates without sympathy “the current of European culture” which is “characterized by the word progress,” adding that “the typical Western scientist doesn’t understand the spirit in which [he writes]” and that he is “aiming at something different than are the scientists” (CV, 9). Over ten years later, Wittgenstein mused that, while progress conceived as technological advancement could open “new opportunities,” it could destroy other opportunities, yielding “ruin” (see Cahill Reference Cahill2011, 132–133 and Rhees Reference Rhees1981, 222–223). And, in 1946, he composed the following lines: “It is not, e.g., absurd to believe that the scientific & technological age is the beginning of the end for humanity, that the idea of Great Progress is a bedazzlement” (CV, 64).

These inscriptions and utterances don’t challenge the idea of progress understood generically as things changing for the better, a notion to which Wittgenstein had no objection. They contest the idea of progress understood as social improvements coupled with the conviction that such improvements must be capturable with the abstract modes of thought of the natural sciences and related technological disciplines. Wittgenstein’s cultural pessimism is an expression not of political conservatism but of a radically critical stance toward a defining trend of European modernity.

Wittgenstein works toward this critique in portions of his writings in which he distances himself from the “naturalistic” outlook that Gellner ascribes to him. In passages in which he asks us to see that all thought is engaged, and that this doesn’t qualify its claim to do justice to how things are (PI §§185–202, 243–270, discussed later in this Element), Wittgenstein makes room for the prospect that imaginative access to engaged attitudes is necessary for getting aspects of the world in focus. If, among these aspects, are some needed to register injuries, injustices, and social pathologies whose elimination is tantamount to social improvement, then this cluster of Wittgenstein’s philosophical concerns accounts for rejecting insistence on exclusively disengaged – scientific and technological – measures of progress. Such insistence may obscure precisely what we need to see to critically assess social changes, and seeing this enables us to appreciate how the assumptions about what a progressive political posture is like that are embedded in Gellner’s polemic against linguistic philosophy can serve as ideological cover for a damaging and unjust status quo.

Whereas, for Russell, Gellner, Popper et al., advocacy of scientific and technological advances is the mark of progressive politics, for Wittgenstein – as for numerous other twentieth- and twenty-first-century political radicals – those who go in for such advocacy may affirm and entrench society as it stands and so may be confused when they congratulate themselves for their anti-conservative credentials. On Wittgenstein’s more oppositional view, distance from a crude conservatism is achieved by refusing to permit social understanding to be the monopoly of abstract, scientific modes of thought and by making room for social transformations whose liberating significance is apparent only to those capable of thinking historically and culturally.

Ironies of Interpretation

One paradox of Words and Things’ uptake is that it aroused suspicions about the political tenor of Wittgenstein’s œuvre even among some outspoken defenders of this oppositional stance who could have claimed Wittgenstein as an ally. It is unsurprising that Gellner’s assault on Wittgenstein and other linguistic philosophers resonated, beyond Oxbridge circles, with those who shared its traditional naturalistic creed and faith in scientific indices of progress, for instance, those participants in the high-profile “positivist dispute” in German sociology and philosophy of the 1960s and 1970s who weighed in on behalf of purely scientific modes of social understanding. This is especially unremarkable given that Popper figured centrally in this dispute. More noteworthy is that Gellner’s charges were repeated by thinkers who were against taking the hard sciences as a guide to social understanding and who held that effective critique must be engaged.

Members of the latter group of thinkers include C. Wright Mills and Perry Anderson, as well as colleagues at the New Left Review (see Hall Reference Hall2011, 114–115). The most dramatic case of such an unlikely partisan of Gellner’s cause, though, is Herbert Marcuse, a member of the first generation of the Institute for Social Research or Frankfurt School, where Marcuse started to work in 1933. Not long afterward, he left Nazi Germany and relocated with the Institute to New York. Marcuse was teaching at Brandeis in 1960 when Words and Things appeared in the US, and he wrote an endorsement of it for its publisher. He lauds Gellner’s book as a “major event in intellectual history,” declaring that “Gellner not only offers a brilliant critique of one of the most representative philosophical schools of our time but he also reveals the ideology inherent in its method and intent” (Marcuse Reference Marcuse1960). A few years later, in a chapter of his celebrated One-Dimensional Man (1964, Ch7), Marcuse reprises Gellner’s charge that Wittgenstein’s philosophy inclines toward a political conservativism that reinforces existing social arrangements. He describes the practice of Wittgenstein and others who favor “linguistic analysis” as “paying respect to the prevailing variety of meanings and usages … [while blocking] analysis of what this speech says about the society that speaks it” (Reference Marcuse1964, 179). Marcuse’s Gellner-inspired gripe is that this philosophical procedure “leaves the established reality untouched” (Reference Marcuse1964, 177) and “shuts off the concepts of a political, i.e., critical analysis” (Reference Marcuse1964, 182; for an explicit nod to Gellner, see 177n.4). Marcuse’s critique still exerts influence, leading some scholars to suspect that grounding critique in “our practices” or “ordinary language” risks ratifying a world structured by domination (for discussion, see Whyman Reference Whyman2023).

Marcuse’s interpretative style, like Gellner’s, is impressionistic. Marcuse cites phrases and sentences from only seven sections of the Investigations, all but one from the portion of the text, favored by Gellner, in which Wittgenstein reflects on philosophy as he practices it (viz., PI §§89–133; Marcuse discusses aspects of 97, 98, 106, 109, 124, and 133). Marcuse touches on only two of these sections more than once (PI §§109, 124), and the one further section from which he quotes is a remark (PI §60) from which he extracts a brief sentence (“my broom is in the corner”) to critique in a context-free manner. Marcuse rehearses not only Gellner’s sparse selection of references but also his harsh tone.

Ironically, Marcuse’s own project turns for its success on an understanding of thought and language that fundamentally resembles Wittgenstein’s. In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse undertakes the Frankfurt School’s signature task of a “critical theory of contemporary society” (Reference Marcuse1964, xli). This label was introduced for accounts of societal arrangements that would enable us to recognize and shake off partly self-imposed, ideologically obscured forms of social coercion. The idea of such an account presupposes that the ways a society depicts and expresses its interests can clash with the actual interests of the people composing it, a circumstance that results in social “irrationality” (Reference Marcuse1964, 11 passim). Marcuse is specifically concerned to accent the clash characteristic of advanced industrial society insofar as it treats human needs and interests as occasions for technological and hence instrumental intervention, suppressing cultural values that resist instrumental capture.

Marcuse’s critique of late industrial civilization includes an attack on prominent trends in philosophy. He is harshly critical of philosophical work that assists the process of “desublimation” through which instrumental reason, extending itself into inappropriate social spheres, obliterates noninstrumental values by incorporating them “in the established order” (Reference Marcuse1964, 60). Contributions to philosophy facilitate this damaging process, he explains, if they are “positivistic” in treating “the orientation of cognitive thought to the physical sciences as a model of certainty and exactness” and exalting “the belief that progress in knowledge depends on this orientation” (Reference Marcuse1964, 176). Marcuse observes correctly that mainstream Anglo-analytic philosophy of his time is thus predominantly “positivistic,” but he wrongly lumps Wittgenstein with the analytic mainstream. This misidentification is the backdrop for the passages in which Marcuse most closely echoes Gellner. Marcuse depicts Wittgenstein as describing linguistic usage in a noncritical “positivistic” style – the style Gellner called “naturalistic” – and he concludes that Wittgenstein’s thought injuriously reinforces the status quo (Reference Marcuse1964, 176–178).

The argument into which this invective against Wittgenstein is integrated pivots on the rejection of the “positivist” beliefs that Marcuse follows Gellner in ascribing to Wittgenstein. To capture the form of social irrationality that is his main critical target, Marcuse must describe existing society, its guiding modes of discourse and action, in normatively rich terms that reveal it as characterized by needs, interests, and values at odds with its entrenched techno-scientific self-understanding. He would have done better to recognize Wittgenstein not merely as a political fellow traveler but as one whose writings are a resource. In the Investigations, as elsewhere in his later writings, Wittgenstein gives an account of how historical and cultural perspectives are embedded in our thought and speech (e.g., PI §18) that lends support to Marcuse’s critical unmasking of social irrationality – and that arguably goes beyond anything on these lines Marcuse himself offers (see Lyas Reference Lyas1982, esp. 167 and 174).

Marcuse’s motive for accepting Gellner’s distorted image of Wittgenstein is to have an exemplar of the positivism-indexed modes of philosophizing that amplify the calamitous irrationality of advanced industrial society. But Marcuse inadvertently teaches a different lesson. He shows that, when “positivistic” modes of philosophizing are prevalent, even those who repudiate them can, against their own intentions, cover up the work of the most original critics of “positivism.” We learn a related lesson about challenges confronting Wittgenstein’s readers when we turn to the work of some notable champions of his philosophy, who, despite their avowals of sympathy, wrongly attribute to him views that, in some fundamentals, are like those Gellner read into him.

The Political Stakes of Supposedly Self-Justifying Forms of Life

Gellner never relented in his polemical hammering of Wittgenstein. Words and Things was reissued in 1979, with the addition of a long, invective-laden introduction. Gellner’s new opening glancingly addresses discussions about Wittgenstein’s philosophy since his book’s original publication. He namechecks the previous two decades’ key defenders of Wittgenstein, including Stanley Cavell, Stuart Hampshire, Norman Malcolm, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Gellner (Reference Cavell1979, 11, 19–26). And he offers a catchy repackaging of his original attack. Wittgenstein’s equivocal achievement, Gellner declares, was a facile solution to two problems confronting “modern man.” With its “naturalistic” image of the world as evacuated of meaning and value, modernity confronts us with a problem of validation, since it is unclear where to find normative hooks to “justify the basic premisses of the options we have collectively chosen or will choose, in our cognitive, political, economic and other styles.” Modernity also obliges us to address a related problem of enchantment, since it ushers in a Weberian domain of “icy disenchantment” in which it is unclear how to satisfy our longing for the transcendent and mysterious (Gellner Reference Giddens1979, 19). Gellner reads Wittgenstein as proposing to solve these twin problems by tying meaning to the ungrounded customs of a community. This appears to make cultures self-justifying, “so the problem of validation is solved.” Further, because “the cultures which provide the solution also contain that ample richness which gives our life its fullness … the very same move” solves the problem of enchantment (Gellner Reference Gellner1979, 11).

Gellner riffs on themes of Words and Things in denigrating this allegedly Wittgensteinian project. It is all “rubbish,” he complains, a deflection from honest grappling with the day’s issues. What is “totally and utterly misguided” about Wittgenstein’s philosophy is, Gellner complains a few years before his own death in 1994, the idea “that there is no general solution to issues other than the custom of the community. Communities are ultimate” (Davis and Gellner Reference Davis and Gellner1991, 65).While this reading is tendentious, Gellner captures something characteristic of the reception of Wittgenstein’s work. His image of Wittgenstein resonates with a conception of the significance of Wittgenstein’s philosophy for ethics and politics that, starting in the 1950s, was developed by some sympathetic readers. This group includes Malcolm and Pears, though not Cavell, who was a vocal critic of the pertinent interpretative strain. In 1976, G.E.M. Anscombe laments that the reading is treated as exegetical commonsense. “In [Wittgenstein’s] work up to On Certainty,” she writes, many readers wrongly think they discern “a straightforward thesis: there can be no such thing as ‘rational grounds’ for our criticizing practices and beliefs that are so different from our own. These alien practices and language games are simply there. They are not ours, we cannot move in them” (1981[1976], 125).

The “straightforward thesis” Anscombe identifies – that natural languages are bounded and yet, in a sense, groundless – proved pivotal for many commentaries. Readers who take Wittgenstein to be advancing versions of this thesis draw attention to his accent on the “language-games” into which words are integrated and claim he should be understood as conceiving languages as rule-bound systems in which established practices determine the projections of words, allowing for and excluding some “moves” with them. To normatively contest or make a case for revisiting linguistic practices, on this view, one must first get a view of its moves, say, by learning the game. Only through a perspective “internal” to the game is it possible to conduct any meaningful critique or transformation. So, the very idea of “external” or game-transcendent rational assessment of a linguistic practice needs to be jettisoned. To pursue it is to confusedly try to invoke a “perspective from outside” that lacks rational bite.

The foregoing is an outline of a view of Wittgenstein that gets admiringly developed, despite resembling the unflattering views of Gellner and others. Gellner’s “naturalistic” outlook is implicit in the idea that we need some theoretical construction – say, a practice-based theory of meaning – to give us normative footholds. Linguistic practices may seem to supply not only normative guidance (“validity”) but also fullness of meaning (“enchantment”). And critique appears culturally constrained in ways that leave existing practices “inviolable” (Crary Reference Crary, Crary and Read2000b). To understand how this reading became central to a novel account of the political implications of the later Wittgenstein’s thought, it helps to begin with the reading’s progenitor, American philosopher Norman Malcolm.

The Roots of an Allegedly Wittgensteinian Liberal Relativism

Malcolm was one of Wittgenstein’s closest friends and most outspoken philosophical defenders. In the fall of 1938, when Malcolm was a visiting graduate student at Cambridge, he started attending Wittgenstein’s lectures. Wittgenstein took to Malcolm, started inviting him on walks, and even gave him a substantial sum of money to extend his stay in England. Despite turbulence in their relationship’s first year, they remained friends until Wittgenstein died, corresponding and crossing the Atlantic for visits. During these years, there were two sustained intervals – in 1946–1947 and 1949 – in which Malcolm discussed drafts of the Investigations with his mentor (see Malcolm Reference Malcolm1958).

These periods of affectionate exchange gave Malcolm a lifelong interest in Wittgenstein’s philosophical methods. Throughout his career, Malcolm returned to Wittgensteinian themes, arguing that the turn to language-games marks a paradigm shift in philosophy. Wittgenstein, he claims, replaces the familiar view of linguistic expressions as reflections of meaning with the idea that shared use determines meaning. Malcolm’s attribution to Wittgenstein of a theory of meaning fixed by established linguistic practices – a use-theory of meaning – is more precise but not fundamentally different from Gellner’s claim that linguistic community determines meaning. Moreover, treating a use-theory as Wittgenstein’s defining philosophical move, Malcolm – like Gellner et al. – argues that it renders linguistic practices immune to rational scrutiny.

One place Malcolm claims to find this use-theory-based method is the sections of the Investigations known as the privacy sections – roughly, §§243–315. Malcolm takes these sections to demonstrate the impossibility of a language that is private in the sense that it “cannot be understood by anyone other than the speaker” (Malcolm Reference Malcolm1963, 97). He thinks Wittgenstein appeals to a use-theory to argue that it is a condition of meaningful linguistic moves that there are established practices to ground the distinction between projecting a word correctly and merely being under the impression of doing so (Malcolm Reference Malcolm1963, 96–97). An “essentially private language” is impossible since it cannot ground this distinction.

A further task of the privacy sections is exploring what attracts about the idea of an essentially private language. Malcolm takes the main offender to be the classic empiricist idea that “there is only a contingent and not an essential connection between a sensation and its outward expression” (Malcolm Reference Malcolm1963, 97). This idea makes it seem natural to conceive individuals’ inner experience as essentially private mental contact with items in a private realm. It makes it seem natural to say things like: “I can only believe that someone else is in pain, but I know it if I am” (PI §303; Malcolm Reference Malcolm1963, 97). Malcolm notes that Wittgenstein believes there is something confused about treating an individual’s relation to their pain or other aspects of their inner experience as one of knowledge (Malcolm Reference Malcolm1963, 110). Malcolm proposes (in Reference Malcolm1977c) that Wittgenstein’s strategy for showing this is employing a use-theory of meaning to criticize utterances like “I know I am in pain.”

This purportedly Wittgensteinian strategy underpins Malcolm’s account of the privacy sections. In a 1967 essay, he identifies three ordinary roles “I know” plays when prefixed to a sentence p: it can indicate that the speaker has grounds for asserting p, is an authority on the subject, or is in a privileged position to judge whether p is true (Malcolm Reference Malcolm1977c, 125). On this basis, Malcolm portrays claims to know as dispelling doubts, making such claims incompatible with situations where doubt is unintelligible. He concludes that when “I know” precedes “I have pain,” it cannot perform any of its normal functions, since “it is not a genuine possibility that someone who understands the words should be mistaken in saying he has pain” (Malcolm Reference Malcolm1977c, 127). There are exceptional cases where “I know I’m in pain” might make sense – such as correcting a dentist who claims Novocain has relieved one’s pain (Malcolm Reference Malcolm1977b, 124) – but otherwise the utterance is nonsensical. For Malcolm, this is what Wittgenstein means when he writes that “it makes sense to say about other people that they doubt whether I am in pain; but not to say it about myself” (PI §246).

Here the application of a use-theory of meaning is the occasion for Wittgenstein’s employment of “nonsense” as a term of criticism. This is exegetically dubious, but not because there is any doubt that “nonsense” is in Wittgenstein’s critical repertoire. Throughout his œuvre, Wittgenstein is preoccupied with how we conceive the bounds of sense. A recurring theme of his work is that it is confused to construe the limits of sense as keeping us from saying particular things we might have wanted to say. Such construals put us in the inconsistent position of seeming to have some grasp of combinations of words that by our own lights are nonsense. As Wittgenstein puts it in the Preface to the Tractatus, they put us in the inconsistent position of seeming to be “able to think what cannot be thought” (TLP, p.23). He tries to set us aright by getting us to give up the idea that some sequences of words represent attempts to express “impermissible thoughts,” imploring us to stop fancying that we deal in intelligible bits of nonsense or “senseless senses.” We should see that when, in philosophy, “a sentence is called senseless,” it is simply that we have no use for a string of words and have “withdrawn [it] from circulation” (PI §500).

This lesson gets muddled in Malcolm’s account of the Investigations’s privacy sections. Malcolm is aware of Wittgenstein’s stress on how to represent the limits of sense and aims to be faithful to it. Reflecting on his own analysis of “I know I am in pain,” Malcolm denies presupposing any idea of “unthinkable thoughts.” “I do not mean,” he writes, “that I perceive, as it were, a clash of meanings in my mind when I say [‘I know I am in pain’]” (Reference Malcolm1977c, 125). This doesn’t, however, square with what Malcolm says. His supposedly Wittgensteinian critique of utterances of “I know I am in pain” turns on his claim that the logical roles “I know” ordinarily plays are incompatible with what “I am in pain” expresses. Malcolm presents himself as having a grasp of what the person who says “I know I am in pain” wishes to express and as determining that there are insurmountable logical obstacles to saying that. Nor are Malcolm’s difficulties expressions of a superficial feature of his thinking. The idea of a category of “intelligible nonsense” is sewn into the fabric of the use-theory-based method he ascribes to Wittgenstein. Nothing short of radically rethinking his reading of Wittgenstein would detach Malcolm from “senseless senses” (see Crary Reference Crary1990).

There is another problem with Malcolm’s reading. He plausibly sees classic empiricism as the source of the idea of an essentially private language. This tradition leaves no room for a necessary connection between inner experience and outer expression. Human perception, on this view, involves the passive reception of causally produced sensory contents, absent any essential role for the subject. Such an account seems to demand that we exclude from our conception of the world all features intelligible only through affective or subjective response, rendering the world itself devoid of meaning and value. Since human expressive behavior belongs to this world, it must likewise be seen as normatively neutral and psychologically insignificant. Thus, classic empiricism appears to separate expressive behavior from mental states. Malcolm’s point is that, once we accept this inner/outer divide, we are led to locate psychological life outside behavior – softening us up to imagine it as confined to an essentially private inner realm.

Malcolm follows Wittgenstein in rejecting the idea of such a realm. Yet he retains a philosophy of psychology that presupposes a classic empiricist framework. He holds that mental terms can be translated into normatively neutral, merely physical-behavioral terms. Logical behaviorism is the label typically applied to positions of this description, and Malcolm adopts such a position and reads it into Wittgenstein (Malcolm Reference Malcolm1977c, 101–102). This is an interpretative misstep. Wittgenstein’s outlook is at odds with logical behaviorism in more than local ways. Wittgenstein repudiates the empiricist categories in which the stance is articulated. He asks us to see that human expressive behavior is normatively saturated. For him, capturing the psychological meaning of such behavior is a matter of sensitive discernment. Through a transformed view of expressive behavior and the capacities for getting it into focus, he dismantles the “problem” about our knowledge of other minds that logical behaviorism aims to solve.

Had Malcolm registered Wittgenstein’s anti-empiricist animus and grasped that linguistic expression is among the expressive behaviors Wittgenstein sees as normatively saturated, he might have appreciated that Wittgenstein has no more need for a use-theory of meaning than for a theory of mind on the lines of logical behaviorism. But Malcolm continues, to the end of his life, to treat a use-theory as central to Wittgenstein’s philosophical practice (e.g., Malcolm Reference Malcolm and Winch1989). This not only leads him afoul of Wittgenstein’s reflections on the limits of sense but also fools him into wrongly attributing to Wittgenstein the view that linguistic practices are rationally inviolable.

This latter view flows directly from a use-theory of meaning. Here, it is possible to deploy critical categories in accordance with the conventions constitutive of a language game. But there is a logical obstacle to criticizing language-games themselves. Any attempt to do so would undercut the critical terms it tried to mobilize in scrutiny of the linguistic practice within which those terms are intelligible. So, we are supposed to accept our inability to transgress a logical barrier that we would need to pierce to assess the forms of life in which we use words. “As philosophers,” Malcolm declares, “we must not attempt to justify the forms of life, to give reasons for them” (Reference Malcolm1963, 120). Malcolm cautions against resisting this restriction without noticing he is again proscribing apparent bits of “intelligible nonsense.” His accent is on arguing that resistance here is a distinctively philosophical “pathology” (Reference Malcolm1977b, 206) stemming from failure to grasp that, whereas “[w]ithin a language-game there is justification and lack of justification, evidence and proof, mistakes and groundless opinions, good and bad reasoning, correct measurements and incorrect ones … [o]ne cannot properly apply these terms to a language-game itself” (Reference Malcolm1977b, 208).

Malcolm emphasizes these allegedly Wittgensteinian themes above all regarding On Certainty, a posthumous book composed of notes that Wittgenstein wrote in the year and a half before his death, covering topics that he discussed with Malcolm during a visit to the US in 1949 (Reference Malcolm1958, 70–75). A view of language-games as inviolable is, Malcolm suggests, spelled out there with singular force. He takes this book to show how, in grounds-seeking regresses, we eventually hit upon beliefs that cannot be justified, such as that we live on the Earth (Malcolm Reference Malcolm1977b, 203; alluding to e.g., OC §§84–5) or that material things do not just vanish (Malcolm Reference Malcolm1977b, 200; alluding to, e.g., OC §101). Such beliefs are putatively more certain than any evidence we might use to ground them. They have “framework” status, and Malcolm variously refers to them as “framework beliefs” or “hinges” of our practices (referencing OC §§341–3). While hinges shift over time, substantially changing them means abandoning the game. On Malcolm’s reading, hinges are immune to rational assessment. This gesture of Malcolm’s reverberates and is variously elaborated in the work of many subsequent commentators, including McGinn (Reference McGinn1989), Stroll (Reference Stroll1994), Moyal-Sharrock (Reference Moyal-Sharrock2004), Pritchard (Reference Pritchard2016), and Coliva (Reference Coliva2022).

It is true that, in On Certainty, Wittgenstein is concerned with the special role that some empirical judgments play in our thought. But the point he makes about judgments that “stand fast for us” is one that, far from creating an unstable and indefinite class of thoughts that are somehow intelligible yet not critically assessable, reflects a dimension of his view of the limits of sense. Wittgenstein tries to wean us, we saw, from the confused idea that we can identify the logical character of expressions or features of speech-situations outside the context of complete judgments (i.e., outside what he sometimes calls “the stream of thought and life” [Z §173]). He urges that, to identify the logical character of linguistic expressions, we must start with complete judgments and find the logical contributions particular expressions make to them (Conant Reference Conant1998). And he attacks pictures of language acquisition on which we learn how to judge by appealing to the guidance of prior logical categories or rules. In an extended passage of On Certainty, he reminds us that “[w]e do not learn the practice of making empirical judgments by learning rules: we are taught judgments and their connection with other judgments” (OC §140). Since “[w]e use judgments as principles of judgment” (OC §124; §§128–131, 149), it follows that, to recognize an utterance as a judgment, we must incorporate it into the pattern of things we recognize as judgments. This leaves room for situations – ubiquitous in On Certainty – in which, although it at first appears that a person is judging very differently, we fail to locate her utterance or inscription within a nexus of judgments – and so fail to recognize her as judging at all (see OC §§71–74, 79–81, 138, 155, 420, 659, 674). Our experience of not being able to make sense of a new utterance reveals our reliance on other judgments that, for the time being, don’t come into question for us. That is what Wittgenstein has in mind in saying that we “discover” the judgments that stand fast for us (OC §152; Crary Reference Crary, Certainty, Moyal-Sharrock and Brenner2005).

The contrasting view Malcolm ascribes to Wittgenstein, on which language-games are inviolable, fundamentally resembles the interpretations of critics from Section 1 who read Wittgenstein as inclining toward conservatism. Malcolm didn’t foreground political questions. Yet he intimates a different, liberal-progressive lesson. He believes it is in the spirit of Wittgenstein’s thought to resist any attempt at reason-based comparisons of distinct linguistic practices, approaching this point via an analogy between the frameworks of our linguistic practices and religious beliefs. These frameworks are supposed to be like religious beliefs in organizing our view of the world and giving it meaning while being empirically ungrounded matters of faith (Reference Malcolm1977b, 205–216). The idea is that we are no more able to rationally ground scientific disciplines than religion:

Malcolm here lays the groundwork for what became known as Wittgensteinian fideism, a tradition associating Wittgenstein with an idea of knowledge as reliant on faith (see Nielsen Reference Nielsen1982).

Malcolm spins this idea so that it seems to speak for liberal toleration, asking us to acknowledge that “the boundaries of the system within which you calculate may not be exactly the same as my boundaries” (Reference Malcolm1977b, 203). Since there is no question of positioning one “system” above others, it appears incumbent on us to accept a plurality of values. That explains how, while not a political thinker, Malcolm contributed to the development of a liberal-relativistic view of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy that became, for a while, the best-recognized counter to conservative views.

Peter Winch on the Idea of a Social Science

A faithful recounting of the history of the emergence of the liberal-relativistic reading must include a commentary on the work of British philosopher and influential Wittgenstein scholar Peter Winch. Winch is central to the emergence of the liberal-relativistic view of Wittgenstein’s later thought, even though the reception of his work is, in a sense, vexed. It was Winch who introduced Wittgenstein to many social and political philosophers (Pleasants Reference Pleasants2000, 78–79), and it is a version of Winch’s reading that typically pops up in subsequent attributions to Wittgenstein of varieties of liberal-relativism (see, esp. Lukes and Runciman Reference Lukes and Runciman1974, 165–166; O’Grady Reference O’Grady2004, 316; and Vinten Reference Vinten2020, esp. 19–21), though there is intense debate about whether Winch actually makes this (mis)attribution.

In 1951, Winch got his first teaching job at the University of Wales, home to a faculty with several colleagues steeped in the philosophy of Wittgenstein. Among them was American philosopher and one-time student and literary executor of Wittgenstein, Rush Rhees. Winch developed his own interest in Wittgenstein and later expressed his sense of indebtedness to Rhees (Lyas Reference Lyas1999, 4). Winch’s philosophical preoccupations include the bearing of Wittgenstein’s philosophy on what social phenomena are like and on what is involved in understanding and critically assessing them.

Winch’s most systematic treatment of these topics is in his influential Reference Winch1958 book The Idea of a Social Science. The book contests the establishment view that the natural sciences are the sole model for the study of social life (Reference Winch1958, 1–2). Its strategy hinges on a distinctive social ontology. Social phenomena are, Winch claims, made up of constellations of “meaningful behavior,” a class that includes not just acts of thought and speech but all full-fledged actions. The mark of meaningful behavior is that it at least tacitly brings concepts into play, making it in principle possible for an agent to recognize that what they have done “commits [them] to behaving in one way rather than another in the future” (Reference Winch1958, 50). Winch reminds us that concepts are universals, resources for going on and doing the same in indefinitely many cases, and so fit the model of rule-following. To clarify the notion of meaningful, concept-involving behavior, he turns to the Investigations’ “rule-following sections” (PI §§185–202).

These sections feature an extended commentary on a regress that seems to arise if we conceive grasping a rule’s meaning as a matter of hitting upon a rote-like interpretation of the rule that itself needs to be applied (PI §198). We are told that the suggestion of a regress represents a “misunderstanding” (PI §201) and urged not to try to overcome the regress but to reorient ourselves so that it doesn’t get started. We are supposed to register the significance of responses we acquired in coming to operate with rules. The idea is to see that the grasp of a rule or concept invariably involves the exercise of practical proclivities and that “the application of a word … is not everywhere bounded by rules” (PI §84; see McDowell Reference McDowell1998, Chs.10 and 12).

Winch’s Reference Winch1958 treatment of Wittgenstein on rule-following evokes this line of thought, though it is often misread as a straightforward amplification of Malcolm’s reading. Winch emphasizes the social contexts in which we apply rules. He notes that to follow a rule is to go on in the same way, observing that “we do not know whether two things are to be regarded as the same or not unless we are told the context in which the question arises” (Reference Winch1958, 27). The Malcolmian approach would be to interpret Winch as proposing that we survey contexts in which we use expressions for rules and produce a formula that, we may imagine, fixes what counts as going on in the same way. But Winch instead emphasizes that “no formula will solve [the problem of how to follow a rule]” (Reference Winch1958, 29) and that the key to release us from regress-induced befuddlement is the acknowledgment that, in grasping the meanings of rules, we necessarily rely on our feel for them, our “propensity to go on doing the same kind of thing” (Reference Winch1958, 60).

Winch employs his Wittgenstein-inspired study of rules to capture the nature of the meaningful behavior at issue in the social sciences. He argues that all modes of thought, including the natural-scientific, are shaped by thinkers’ sensibilities. But he is principally concerned with variations among domains of thought, not equivalences. “If we look at the contexts in which notions of understanding … are used,” he writes, “we find that these differ amongst themselves” (1958, 18). A core distinction of sociological understanding can, he explains, be phrased thus: “Whereas in the case of the natural scientist we have to deal with only one set of rules, namely, those governing the scientist’s investigation itself … what the sociologist is studying, as well as his study of it, is a human activity and is therefore carried on according to rules” (Reference Winch1958, 87). Winch thinks this observation supports “common sense” beliefs such as

Winch concludes that understanding a realm of human behavior requires imaginative entry into routes of feeling characteristic of participants in it.

For some readers, this position seems indistinguishable from a problematic relativism. Indeed, Gellner lauded Winch’s book as “outstanding” – albeit only for inadvertently showing the disastrous implications of Wittgenstein’s mature philosophy for social anthropology: “It constitutes the best, most elegant and forceful, if quite unintended, refutation of Wittgenstein – one far more forceful than any stated by a deliberate critic” (1968, 381). The central complaint, as a later commentator put it, is that “there is a denial of some external vantage point from which different views of the world can be judged” (O’Grady Reference O’Grady2004, 316).

But Winch (Reference Winch1958) rejects the suggestion of a conception of discursive domains as immune to criticism. Winch’s stance depends for its plausibility on the philosophical reorientation enabled by a Wittgensteinian view of rule-following. The view invites us to regard all world-directed thought as drawing on sensitivities. This only appears to intimate a relativist stance if we retain the notion of a vantage point from which to discern that our sensitivities have an essential tendency to block our view of things. Winch seems to forfeit this notion in treating imaginative exploration of sensitivities characteristic of participants in a discursive domain as necessary for discovering ways in which the discourse does or doesn’t capture what things are like. Far from lacking critical bite, the social understanding he is describing may, he holds, make use of “concepts which are not taken from the forms of activity” under investigation and may reveal fundamental confusions and errors (1958, 89). Winch seems to take from Wittgenstein not the conservative tutelage that Gellner finds, nor the liberal-relativistic moral that Malcolm favors, but a novel lesson about reason-governed social understanding.

In a high-profile 1964 article, “Understanding a Primitive Society,” Winch returns to “some questions raised in [his 1958] book” about “the concept of learning from a primitive society” (1964, 307). The article critically examines British anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s 1937 study of witchcraft among the Azande in central Africa. Self-consciously echoing Wittgenstein’s notes on anthropologist James Frazer, Winch criticizes Evans-Pritchard’s account for its scientistic representation of Zande witchcraft as a cluster of mistaken scientific beliefs.

Commentators generally agree about this much but disagree about further points of Winch’s Reference Winch1964 argument. Some take him to favor a nonrelativistic view of social understanding of the sort discernible in The Idea of a Social Science (e.g., Zerilli Reference Zerilli2016; Theunissen Reference Theunissen, Campbell and Reid2020). Others take him to present a view with relativistic implications (e.g., Dilman Reference Dilman2002; Diamond Reference Diamond2013a), implying questions about what is real are always indexed to an established mode of discourse and that a mode of discourse, say, Zande witchcraft, can only be criticized in its own terms.

Relativistic interpretations of Winch Reference Winch1964 are defended by admirers of his supposed relativistic stance, as well as by critics. Rightly or wrongly – a vexed exegetical question we can’t settle here – they set the tone for the reception of Winch’s work. Discussions of all Winch’s work became largely focused on questions of cultural chauvinism and relativity (see Lukes and Hollis Reference Lukes and Hollis1982, 10–15), and the image of Wittgenstein as a liberal relativist, already there in Malcolm, was ushered, however awkwardly, into the exegetical mainstream (see Read, Hutchinson and Sharrock Reference Read, Hutchinson and Sharrock2008, Ch1).

Rorty’s Liberal Ironism

The lion’s share of responsibility for the idea that Wittgenstein’s later philosophy serves a version of liberalism falls to American philosopher and public intellectual Richard Rorty. Rorty was a lifelong, outspoken champion of the American anti-communist Left, and he regarded Wittgenstein as a key philosophical ally. The reading of Wittgenstein Rorty favored, and which he presented in high-profile books and articles starting in the 1980s, is a variation on a Malcolm-style inviolability interpretation. But Rorty had a singularly wide sphere of influence for these ideas, stretching beyond Anglo-American philosophical circles to the other humanities and social sciences and to a substantial popular audience across the world.

Rorty was a physicalist who took the disenchanted or “de-divinized” world to pose intractable problems for the enterprise of representation. The gesture at the heart of his mature philosophical output is a resounding cheer for what he sees as the end of the age of “mirroring nature” (Rorty Reference Rorty1979). He regards Wittgenstein as a fellow reveler. Wittgenstein’s conception of language-games amounts, for Rorty, to a withering attack on the position Rorty dubs “realism.” When Rorty talks about realism, he is sometimes concerned with a view about how bits of language represent aspects of the world, and he is sometimes concerned with a further view – one he treats as an elaboration of the first view – about how bits of language represent aspects of the world in a manner purged of vestiges of anything perspectival that enables transparent access to how things are. In eliding these two notions of “realism,” Rorty takes the step, foreign to Wittgenstein, of excluding the possibility of correspondence between language and world that doesn’t presuppose an aperspectival stance. That is a problem for his inheritance from Wittgenstein, since the necessarily engaged character of thought about the world is a moral of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy (see Conant Reference Conant and Brandom2000).

Rorty’s account of how Wittgenstein’s reflections on language-games undermine realism as he understands it – hereafter “realism” – proceeds as follows. Its core is a theory of meaning that, like the use-theory Malcolm ascribes to Wittgenstein, depicts meanings as fixed by expressions’ places in linguistic practices. Within this “pure ‘language-game’ view of language,” there is no room for “questions about ‘ties to the world.’” To know how a sentence is used is to know all there is to know about its semantics. “Such knowledge [is not] a matter of semantical theory,” Rorty quips, “but simple ‘know-how’” (1982, 114). Characterizing language as “true” or “objective” is merely praising its practical success in helping us “cope” in different contexts (1982, xix). That, for Rorty, is how language-games undermine any satisfactory “realism.”

To read Wittgenstein as a critic of Rorty-style “realism” is to read him as endorsing the sort of view about language-games’ critical immunity canvassed earlier. The critic of “realism” denies that any mode of thought or speech more faithfully depicts the world than another. One linguistic practice may seem superior for certain purposes, but not by reference to a common, objective measure. In Rorty’s words, there is no “standpoint outside the particular historically conditioned and temporary vocabulary we are presently using from which to judge this vocabulary” (1989, 48). Our situation, Rorty says, is one in which a vocabulary simply helps us manage better than others (Rorty Reference Rorty1979, Reference Rorty1982). This pairing of accepted internal, pragmatic assessments with the rejection of objective, external ones recapitulates the opposition, noted by Malcolm and others, between permissible internal and prohibited external criticism.

Rorty takes Wittgenstein’s attack on “realism” to motivate the liberal political position that he – Rorty – subscribes to. The distinctive attitude of liberals, for Rorty, is a public commitment to maximally support each individual’s ability to privately pursue their individual conception of the good (Rorty Reference Rorty1989). Assaults on “realism” encourage this attitude by depicting each of us as obliged to accept the absence of rational grounds for our central beliefs and desires. “To see one’s language, one’s conscience, one’s morality, and one’s highest hopes as contingent products,” Rorty writes, “is to adopt a self-identity which suits one for citizenship in … an ideally liberal state” (Rorty Reference Rorty1989, 61). Embracing such citizenship means “giving up the idea that liberalism could be justified, and Nazi or Marxist enemies of liberalism refuted, by driving the latter up an argumentative wall” (Rorty Reference Rorty1989, 53). The stance of the consistent liberal is, to use Rorty’s monicker, “ironic,” in the sense not of lacking commitment but of remaining fully committed despite consciously lacking noncontingent justification (Rorty Reference Rorty1989, xv). Rorty’s Wittgenstein responds to Gellner’s problems of validity and enchantment not with a neat story about how communities bestow meaning and fulfillment but with a messier tale about the task of forging solidarity without being able to prove the transcendent value of any of our projects.

The resources Rorty borrows from Wittgenstein strongly resemble those that inform “conservative Wittgensteinianism,” but Rorty’s political inflection is distinctive. Social criticism can only gesture at how practices hinder or enable coping, but the absence of a reason-based case for social reform doesn’t entail conservative fidelity to existing arrangements. Instead, Rorty urges a rethinking of social change. Rather than being at least partly rationally compelled, it occurs when we begin to speak and act in new ways, opening new realms of meaning. We prepare for change by introducing sentences that do not yet have fixed meanings. “If it is savored rather than spat out,” Rorty writes, such a “sentence may be repeated, caught up, bandied about” (Rorty Reference Rorty1989, 18). If it gains habitual use, it yields new possibilities for meaning and social change. Rorty is interested in efforts to foster change by introducing language-games experienced as liberating by those oppressed under existing institutions. His purportedly Wittgensteinian vocabulary does not lean conservative but aims to accommodate deliberate emancipatory transformation (see Rorty Reference Rorty1991).

Rorty champions the idea of Wittgenstein as a liberal relativist thinker, even while bristling at talk of relativism. He claims that such talk depends for its substance on a contrast with the kind of “realist” stance he regards as confused. But this is unwarranted. Although Rorty excludes the possibility that language might bear on the world in an engaged or perspectival manner, considerations from Wittgenstein’s later philosophy speak for such ordinary realism, and a reference to it suffices as a contrast for talk of relativism. Rorty lacks grounds for spurning the moniker “relativism,” and he is wrong to represent himself as deriving his own position from Wittgenstein.

There are further respects in which Rorty distorts Wittgenstein’s philosophy. During most of his career, Rorty accounts for what he sees as Wittgenstein’s opposition to “realism” by ascribing to Wittgenstein an argument about how “realism” is incoherent. Wittgenstein is taken to move from a demonstration of the impossibility of breaking out of language to compare it with something else to the conclusion that we should reject “realist” discourse as meaningless. But there is a tension, one analogous to the inconsistency at a similar juncture of Malcolm’s thought, in this purportedly Wittgensteinian argument. The argument allegedly establishes that the thesis of “realism” is incoherent and that a lesson about the nature of language follows from its repudiation. It supposedly yields a lesson from the negation of a nonsensical thesis. The problem isn’t merely that this argument falls apart under its own weight. It portrays Wittgenstein as taking a bit of nonsense to be at least sensical enough to illuminate what language is like and so as operating with the kind of “senseless sense” that he inveighs against.

Rorty is aware of these difficulties. Late in his career, he makes a new case for moving from a “realist” vocabulary to his own allegedly Wittgensteinian vocabulary. We should rid ourselves of “realism” not because it is incoherent but because the image of our lives it presents is useless. Rorty calls this a pragmatic pivot. “I should not have spoken of ‘unreal’ or ‘confused’ philosophical distinctions,” he writes, “but rather of distinctions whose employment have proved … to be more trouble than they were worth.” He adds: “For pragmatists like … me, the question should always be ‘What use is it?’ rather than ‘Is it real?’ or ‘Is it confused?’” (Rorty Reference 79Rorty1998, 45).

There are reasons to be uneasy with this pragmatic position. Rorty develops it by giving a pragmatic gloss on an outlook that, earlier, he grounds in an unsatisfactory argumentative engagement with the modern metaphysical tradition. We might reasonably inquire whether adopting pragmatic jargon is enough to free him from entanglement with this tradition (Crary Reference Crary, Crary and Read2000b). Even if we dismiss concerns about how Rorty’s thinking remains shaped by philosophical commitments he now claims to abandon, it is not clear that his outlook is defensible on pragmatic grounds. It is not implausible to defend the political value of some representationalist ideas, say, the idea that some ideologies wrongly represent gender-, race-, disability-, and class-based ideologies as natural and unchangeable and give us distorted pictures of our lives. Those of us afflicted by the oppressive systems partly constitutive of these ideologies often “cope better” when equipped with this idea.

Rorty’s strategy for freeing himself from metaphysical questions that once preoccupied him is to abandon the critical philosophical use of expressions like “nonsensical” and “incoherent.” He thus hopes to do justice to Wittgenstein’s attack on the notion of “senseless sense.” The trouble is that it is characteristic of Wittgenstein to use “nonsense” and its cognates as terms of philosophical criticism. Even if Rorty were successful in developing a pragmatic vision without such terms, it would be wrong to ascribe this vision to Wittgenstein.

Yet Rorty’s portrayal of Wittgenstein as the muse of a distinctive liberal relativism proved influential. Widely discussed – often alongside deconstruction – in literary and theoretical circles of the 1980s and 1990s, it also shaped the reception of Wittgenstein by members of the Frankfurt School’s second generation. Within Anglophone philosophy, especially in its dialogues with the social sciences, Rorty’s Wittgenstein-inspired project became a standard reference point and helped launch a new phase of the “rationality and relativism” debates of the 1970s. There, Rorty appears as the “most eloquent recent exponent” of the “broadly philosophical” motive for embracing relativism, “a principled rejection of the search for the rational foundations of knowledge” (Lukes and Hollis Reference Lukes and Hollis1982, 4). Barry Barnes and David Bloor elaborated this view in their essay for the collection, and the following year Bloor’s monograph on Wittgenstein drew on Gellner in attributing to Wittgenstein “the entire categorical framework of conservative thought” (Bloor Reference Bloor1983, 163). Although the rationality – relativism debates waned by the 1990s, both hostile and sympathetic readings of Wittgenstein as an epistemological, political, or ethical relativist continue to echo the “language-game view of language” Rorty popularized (e.g., Barry Reference Barry1996; Glock Reference Glock1996; Kirk Reference Kirk1999; Coliva Reference Coliva2010, 188; Phillips Reference Phillips2007; Kusch Reference Kusch and Rinofner-Kreidl2016). The influence of Malcolm–Rorty’s interpretations is likewise evident in later pragmatist engagements with Wittgenstein: when pragmatists claim him as an ally, it is typically the liberal-relativist reading that prevails (e.g., Boncompagni Reference Boncompagni2016, 161–2; Brandom Reference Brandom2019, 18–9; Pihlström Reference Pihlström2023, 177).

Liberal-relativist readings often home in on remarks in On Certainty in which Wittgenstein imagines encounters between people with apparently irreconcilable worldviews. There are people who consult oracles to determine what the world is like (OC §609), people who believe (in the early 1950s) that people sometimes travel to the moon (OC §§106–108), and a person who believes the world started with them (OC §92). Wittgenstein says that although we may “convert” such people to our way of thinking, “it [will] be a conversion of a special kind” ( OC §92). We may be forced to pin our hopes for cross-cultural understanding on methods designed to shape others’ responses, that is, on methods of “persuasion” (OC §§262, 669).

Fans of liberal-relativist readings generally take this putative distinction between reason-giving and persuasion/conversion as an endorsement of their bifurcation between rational and nonrational methods. This overlooks Wittgenstein’s preoccupation in On Certainty with how all judgments are shaped by thinkers’ feel for patterns among judgments. Nor is there any suggestion, here or elsewhere in Wittgenstein’s writings, of thinking that wondrously jumps to an extruded standpoint from which to discern that this embeddedness is a rational taint. As an effort to reshape someone’s perspective or sense of importance, persuasion differs from the giving of reasons, despite not being nonrational. Wittgenstein is not suggesting that, in cases of fundamental cultural difference, our repertoire must include blunt nonrational instruments, any more than he is suggesting that a child’s learning to judge is at bottom a nonrational business. He is imparting a vision of rational life that, because undistorted by rationalistic illusions of purity, can bring within the resources of reason, without any whiff of relativism, an array of ordinary forms of engagement and critique.

In the half-century after Wittgenstein’s death, the notion that Wittgenstein was either a conservative or a liberal relativist took on a life of its own. But during the same period, more faithful accounts of the political significance of Wittgenstein’s thought were also developed.

Wittgenstein at Oxford

While the seemingly opposed but ultimately consonant readings of “Wittgenstein the conservative” and “Wittgenstein the liberal relativist” gathered steam in the 1950s and 1960s, a different approach to his philosophy took root at Oxford. This approach reckoned with the strains of positivism that had taken universities by storm just before World War II, after Ayer claimed that moral assessments were bits of nonsense bereft of cognitive content and that there were no rational moral arguments. Many took the task of moral philosophy to be pushing back on these claims. Although mostly anti-positivist in this sense, subsequent work in ethics largely preserved the positivistic presupposition that values are not among the furniture of the world and not open to view in a plain sense.

One prominent project on these lines was British philosopher Richard Hare’s universal prescriptivism, on which moral evaluations express noncognitive attitudes toward objects and prescribe ways of acting aligned with those attitudes (e.g., Hare Reference Hare1952, Reference Hare1963). Moral evaluations possess universal force, committing agents to the same attitude toward similar objects going forward, and this purportedly creates space for rational moral argument. Although much subsequent work in ethics, at Oxford and elsewhere, aimed to improve on Hare’s project, his successors generally preserved his residually positivist presuppositions that moral terms don’t designate worldly items and that discerning moral values isn’t a straightforwardly perceptual affair. These are defining features of the then-emerging noncognitivist tradition in ethics.

In the 1950s, some young philosophers at Oxford began to publish on ethics and politics in ways that converged in rejecting this noncognitivist consensus. Among these thinkers was a group who had experienced Oxford’s newly welcoming policies toward women at the start of World War II. Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch arrived at Oxford in the late 1930s. Each repudiated noncognitivist approaches to ethics, and each developed an ethical project that integrated Wittgensteinian themes. None counted political questions as a primary focus, but all inherited from Wittgenstein in ways, at odds with prevailing readings, that aided the emergence of an entirely new understanding of the political significance of Wittgenstein’s philosophy.

Having finished her degree in 1941, Anscombe married, a step that spared her the women’s conscription that took her peers away from the university. A year later, she received a Cambridge fellowship and started to attend Wittgenstein’s lectures. She found his work compelling and became his student and close friend. Wittgenstein would be one of the biggest influences on her thought, and she eventually served for him as a literary executor and translator (see Hayes Reference Hayes2020).

Foot and Murdoch encountered Wittgenstein’s philosophy largely through Anscombe’s mediation, and their engagement with it took shape largely as a shared resistance to prevailing forms of moral theory rather than as an attempt at direct exegesis. What matters for the later political reception of Wittgenstein is how this mode of uptake treats his work as a philosophical practice aimed at dissolving pictures of rational agency that abstract from forms of ethical responsiveness. This orientation would prove decisive for later thinkers who strived to develop broadly liberatory political readings of Wittgenstein.

In the 1950s, a decade in which she translated a significant amount of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass and published An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (Anscombe Reference Anscombe1959) and the Wittgenstein-influenced Intention (Reference Anscombe1957), Anscombe developed an ethical outlook, opposed to noncognitivism, that blends themes from Aristotle’s ethics and Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mind. She combines a distinctive take on Aristotle’s conception of ethics as patterned on natural historical descriptions of humans with the idea, central to Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mind, that behavior expressing aspects of mind is saturated with psychological meaning. Stressing that Wittgenstein is not an empiricist (1959, 14; 1976, 115), she champions the anti-empiricist, anti-noncognitivist, Wittgenstein-inspired view that expressive behavior only comes into focus through a non-neutral lens shaped by a sense of a virtuous human life (1958b; 1981, 64–70), and she brings her moral outlook to bear on public affairs, blasting Oxford’s convocation for conferring an honorary degree on Harry Truman, who made the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Reference Anscombe1981, Ch7).

Encoded in Anscombe’s Wittgensteinian moral outlook is the view that the meanings of ethical concepts have evaluative and descriptive components that aren’t notionally separable. This idea was also important for Murdoch and Foot, who, in 1954, co-taught a class on it, and it was developed in a particularly striking manner in Murdoch’s early writings. Murdoch glosses the Wittgenstein-influenced view that moral concepts have meanings with inseparable descriptive content as one on which a moral concept is “a total difference of Gestalt” (Murdoch Reference Murdoch and Conradi1998, 82). While she doesn’t explicitly refer to Wittgenstein here, Murdoch’s discussion resonates with remarks in which Wittgenstein discusses Gestalt shifts – changes in perceptual sensitivity, novel attunements to phenomena – and associated ideas of aspect changes, most famously associated with the duck-rabbit image (PI II xi, p. 204; PPF 118). On one seeing of the image, we see only a rabbit, until suddenly, though the object of our vision hasn’t changed, our perception transforms, and we see a duck. Murdoch shows that the stakes of such shifts are not merely perceptual. These shifts reconfigure the network of relations through which we grasp concepts, including moral and other evaluative concepts. Politically, this means that changes in collective sensibilities – reorientations in the “Gestalt” of entire social imaginaries – can underwrite changes in moral or civic norms, a standing possibility left open by the embedded nature of ethical and political life.

During the 1950s, Murdoch elaborates her account of moral concepts into an anti-noncognitivist understanding of the features of practical life – such as freedom, moral difference, and moral argument – that philosophers call “moral psychology.” For her, freedom requires self-development not endeavor normatively unchecked by the world (see Murdoch Reference Murdoch and Conradi1998, 83–84); moral differences are divergences in understanding not disagreements about which noncognitive posture to take toward neutrally available facts (Murdoch Reference Murdoch and Conradi1998, 81–82); and moral argument calls for receptivity to ideas that only a cultivated sensibility brings into view, for ethically inflected “vision” (e.g., Reference Murdoch1970, 17–18). Her larger, Wittgenstein-influenced idea is that a faithful ethically inflected vision or sensitivity doesn’t project things that are objectively not there (the duck and rabbit are there the whole time) but reveals aspects of the world to which we might have been previously insensitive.

Murdoch at times formulates what is distinctive about her ethical outlook by saying it accommodates “metaphysics” or “theory” that describes the world in morally charged terms. In a Reference Murdoch and MacKenzie1958 essay, “A House of Theory,” she urges resistance to efforts to eliminate theory not just from ethics but from politics (1958; also 1961). Murdoch ties these efforts to the post-war weakening of British socialism, which has been deflated by its own success in reforming industrial capitalism into the Welfare State. The result is a transition from embracing ideas of solidarity and meaningful work to a concern with welfarist indices attainable without any new vision of social relations. “The socialist movement in England is suffering a loss of energy … the sense of exploitation has faded and the struggle for equality tends to take the form of the struggle for higher wages” (1958, 18–19). Murdoch’s solution is the morally charged reflections about the world she calls theory. “We need, and the Left should provide,” she writes, “some refuge from the cold open field of Benthamite empiricism, a framework, a house of theory” (1958, 28). Theory is required because social phenomena don’t yield to the non-neutral gaze of British philosophy’s reigning empiricism and because it is “impossible not to regard political philosophy in an historical manner” (1958, 25). Without the morally saturated resources of theory, we won’t be able to motivate a movement for greater equality, freedom, and democracy.

In 1960, Murdoch used a review of Words and Things to counterpose this nascent approach with both the naive naturalism that Gellner misleadingly attributes to Wittgenstein and the scientistic approach that she takes his critique to endorse (“I suspect that Mr Gellner … is ready to jettison the whole business [of philosophy] in favor of science” [1960, 352]). “The extremely difficult work of Wittgenstein,” she notes, “so far from providing a facile technique, has not yet been properly studied and assimilated” (1960, 350). In subsequent years, Murdoch’s plea for a “house of theory” was taken up by thinkers who played founding roles in the New Left in the UK and the US. This includes Stuart Hall and others at the New Left Review (During Reference During2007, 24–25), and the activist and politician Tom Hayden, who echoed her call in writing the Port Huron Statement, the 1962 manifesto of Students for a Democratic Society (Brick and Parker eds. Reference Brick and Parker2015, 7–8). The indirect influence of Wittgenstein on these inheritances is often overlooked.

In other respects, a serious reckoning with the political significance of Murdoch’s, Foot’s, and Anscombe’s Wittgenstein-influenced contributions to ethics has been delayed. Recently, there has been a surge of interest in their work (see Lipscombe Reference Lipscomb2022; Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman Reference Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman2022; also Crary Reference Crary2022). Murdoch’s Wittgensteinian image of the moral life in particular has gotten attention from feminists and other critical social theorists who use it, arguing that a willingness to imaginatively adopt different social standpoints, in ways that light up previously neglected aspects of social life, can internally inform liberating social thought (esp. Laugier et al. Reference Laugier, Provost and Trächtler2022; Braune et al. Reference Braune, Cabrera, Laugier and Trächtler2025).

Wittgenstein at Harvard

Meanwhile, an independent conversation about Wittgenstein was starting in the US, led by American philosopher Stanley Cavell. Cavell encountered Wittgenstein’s work as a graduate student in the late 1940s. During the prewar period, several Central European logical positivists, including Rudolph Carnap, Carl Hempel, and Hans Reichenbach, immigrated to the US. There was significant interest in these thinkers’ strains of analytic philosophy. Because the Tractatus was, for many, associated with logical positivism, Wittgenstein’s early book was a common reference point. No further philosophical works by Wittgenstein, save one article (RLF), had been published. But unpublished typescripts of The Blue Book were circulating. Cavell came across a copy and made an abortive attempt to read it (Cavell Reference Cavell2010, 253). What stumped Cavell was Wittgenstein’s suggestion that, when grappling in philosophy with the question “what is the meaning of a word?”, we should attend to how we explain meanings. Cavell felt that the “question was being evaded.” How we talk about meanings couldn’t bear directly on what meanings are. It would require most of a decade, another failed attempt (Cavell Reference Cavell2010, 312), and “the overcoming of the particular sense of language and world” driving his resistance before Cavell profited from reading Wittgenstein (Reference Cavell2001, 89–90).

The catalyst for Cavell’s receptivity to Wittgenstein was Austin, the central figure of Oxford “ordinary language philosophy” (OLP). Cavell was a PhD student at Harvard when Austin visited in spring 1955 to deliver lectures and give a seminar. Austin’s seminar led Cavell to reassess OLP’s gesture of asking us to consider contexts in which we ordinarily use words. He came to see this gesture as turning attention in a direction we are disinclined to look, toward our own sense of the similarities among the contexts in which we use words. He was gripped by the idea that in speaking, we draw on our feel for paths along which words are projected. Later, Cavell described this as a conversion. The shift reoriented him in philosophy, preparing him to look afresh at Wittgenstein’s Investigations, a text that previously “left [him] cold” (1994, 129). What now moved him was how, unlike other works in the analytical tradition, it “encouraged, or liberated one for, an interest in one’s experience” (Reference Cavell, Bauer, Crary and Laugier2022a, 96).

The point of Cavell’s philosophical origin story is not to suggest an equivalence between Austin’s and Wittgenstein’s teachings. Cavell accents differences between them, at times selectively leveling criticisms at Austin, at times selectively praising Wittgenstein (e.g., Cavell Reference Cavell1969b, 105–111 and Reference Cavell1979, 175). But among the philosophical procedures Cavell most values in Wittgenstein is one he recognizes as characteristic of Austin. Both Wittgenstein and Austin appeal to ordinary language as a tool of philosophical criticism. They push us to contemplate everyday contexts in which we produce words we use in philosophizing, positioning us to ask whether there are any renderings of our philosophical utterances that satisfy us and to judge whether we understand our own words (see, e.g., Austin Reference Austin1962).

The philosophical potency of this exercise became a guiding concern of Cavell’s writings, including his magnum opus The Claim of Reason. In one passage of the book, for instance, Cavell identifies and interprets as such an exercise the portions of Investigations that critically explore the idea of a logically private sensation-language (Cavell Reference Cavell1979, 329ff.). Cavell reads this stretch of text against the backdrop of an exegetical consensus that arose in the years immediately after Wittgenstein’s death. Many readers depicted Wittgenstein as defending a use-theory on which meanings are determined by established linguistic practices, and, as we saw, some of these readers, like Malcolm, took Wittgenstein’s reflections on privacy to encode this theoretical commitment. Wittgenstein is read as appealing to a use-theory to exclude the possibility of a logically private sensation language (Malcolm Reference Malcolm1963). Cavell shows that pertinent sections of the Investigation, PI §§243–270, are methodologically more distinctive. Instead of making the theoretical point that “there can be no private language,” they aim to elicit the recognition that we ourselves are unclear what we mean when we utter the words “private language” and that, “when we as it were try to imagine [such a language], we are imagining something other than what we think” (Cavell Reference Cavell1979, 344).

Wittgenstein’s remarks are a series of attempts to find projections of the terms “private” and “language” that, in Cavell’s words, “realize the fantasy of a private language” (Cavell Reference Cavell1979, 348). PI §243 introduces the notion of “a language in which a person could write down his inner experiences … for his private use.” But this could describe the mundane practice of keeping a diary in code to prevent others from reading it. A suitably private language must, it seems, be such that its “individual words … refer to what can only be known to the person speaking; to his immediate private sensations” (PI §243). PI §258 asks us to try concretely imagining such a private sensation-language. It features a private diarist who expresses a putative sensation by writing “S” when it recurs. This diarist cannot operate with a definition of S (say, that it denotes a pain at the temples), for others could understand this. He can only track S through inward attention. That is the entirety of his S-behavior because any characteristic responses (becoming agitated, drinking heavily, etc.) would open the supposed sensation to understanding by others. But if S-writing is the diarist’s only expression, it’s not clear why we should say S is a sensation. Indeed, it’s not clear why we should say S is anything at all (PI §261). Cavell comments, “to suggest that someone may have ‘made a note of nothing whatever’ is to suggest that someone may have done nothing whatever” (Reference Cavell1979, 250). Efforts to realize the idea of a private sensation-language thus disintegrate. The point is not the incoherence of a particular combination of words but our incoherence. We take ourselves to mean something by “private language” and are confused about what we ourselves are saying.

The gulf between Wittgenstein’s philosophical procedures and prevalent views of philosophical method is an abiding topic of Cavell’s. His first substantial publication was a response to a critique of OLP by Berkeley philosopher Benson Mates. Mates (Reference Mates1958) assumes ordinary language philosophers’ assertions about “what we say when” are statistical claims that lack the type of quantitative evidence that would justify them. Cavell responds by denying Mates’ assumption. Native speakers can orient themselves in philosophy without empirical linguistics by thinking of distinctions they learned in learning to speak, since learning to speak involves getting a feel for the importance of the similarities uniting different uses of words. “[T]he native speaker” who is asked whether a word is properly used can, in general, “rely on his own nose” (Cavell Reference Cavell1969c, 4).

Cavell is impatient with commentators like Gellner who take Wittgenstein to hold that languages are systems of rules that determine the bounds of sense. Cavell unceremoniously dismisses Words and Things on the ground that its author doesn’t substantively engage with representatives of the English philosophical tradition he claims to be criticizing and “vulgarly imagines that his sociological reduction in itself proves [the trend’s] intellectual inconsequence and social irrelevance or political conservatism” (Reference Cavell1969b, 113; 1988, 43–44). Cavell discusses Pole’s (Reference Pole1958) early monograph on Wittgenstein in greater detail (Cavell Reference Cavell1969c) but is equally unsparing in his criticism. Pole thinks Wittgenstein regards language as a symbolism with strict rules, a view that figures in Wittgenstein’s later writings only as a critical target. In The Blue and Brown Books, Wittgenstein asks, “why … we in philosophizing constantly compare our use of words with one following exact rules?” He then reflects that “the puzzles which we try to remove always spring from just this attitude to language” (BB, 25–26, cited in Cavell Reference Cavell1969c, 51). Cavell rejects Pole’s work by quipping: “Whether the later Wittgenstein describes language as roughly like a calculus with fixed rules working in that way is not a question that can seriously be discussed” (Reference Cavell1969c, 48).

Cavell contests Gellner’s and Pole’s suggestions of an “intellectual, even social conservatism” on Wittgenstein’s part (Reference Cavell1969c, 57). Referring to the infamous idea that philosophy leaves “everything as it is” and “may in no way interfere with the actual use of language” (PI §124), Cavell allows that “[t]here is a frame of mind in which this may appear as something intolerably confining” (Reference Cavell1969c, 57). But the gestures are best understood as “liberating” (Reference Cavell1969c, 57n.7). When Wittgenstein asks us to attend to how we use a word, he is exhorting us to test the word’s projection against our own sense of salience and take responsibility for what we say. He is conceiving philosophy as the pursuit of forms of self-knowledge that we require to register our existing linguistic habits clearly enough to rebel against “the very herd that has created this language as its proper expression” (BT 311e; Cavell Reference Cavell1969c, 72). He is illustrating a method that liberates by awakening us to our capacity for novel, revolutionary, or, as Cavell puts it, “aversive” thinking (Cavell Reference Cavell1990, Ch1).

This latter theme has been elaborated by Rupert Read, who offers an emancipatory interpretation of Wittgenstein that radicalizes themes from Cavell and Murdoch. In reference to a reading of PI §§1–309, Read frames liberation from ideology, parsed in terms of freedom from captivity to misleading pictures, whether of contingent social arrangements, intellectual norms, or forms of domination, as the animating force of the Investigations. Wittgenstein’s goal is to free himself, and us, from a sense that we are constrained by inexorable logical, metaphysical, or technocratic demands, showing instead how such demands arise from our own ways of thinking and speaking. Liberation does not consist in offering alternative theories but in loosening the grip of “unwilled adherence to ideology” that underwrites political and social fatalism and withdrawal from politics (Read Reference Read2021, 2) (also Sluga Reference Sluga2011, Ch8).

Cavell notes a second emancipatory aspect of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. It liberates in the first sense, that of displaying our capacity for original thought, by inviting us to recognize that a sense of what matters to us is essential to our ability to think. It frees us from the modern European ideology of disenchantment that appears to make dispassionate abstraction the mark of legitimate thought. This ideology treats reflection on our existences and their worldly settings as if we were agglomerations of indifferent elements, rather than beings whose lives have aspects only accessible to those capable of listening at morally charged frequencies. Recognizing this means rebelling and accepting that, as Wittgenstein puts it, the fact of language reveals “agreement in … form of life” (PI §241). Cavell glosses this agreement as “the attunement of one human being’s words with another’s” (Reference Cavell1979, 32). With such attunement subtending our ability to communicate in language, investigations that internally explore sensibility, and that are anything but impassive, are seen to be internal to genuine thought. If we protest against this relativizing thought, we merely exhibit our “disappointment” with the conditions of human knowledge (Reference Cavell1979, 44). Wittgenstein offers a route to emancipation from the aspiration, compulsory within European modernity, to live cut off from our own routes of feeling. Cavell’s term for this aspiration is “skepticism,” and he links Wittgenstein’s engagement with it to the thought of early Frankfurt School philosophers like Theodor Adorno. Cavell agrees with these thinkers in taking the creeping hegemony of instrumental reason characteristic of modernity, and internal to capitalism’s spread, to be a driver of the conspicuous and damaging forms of self-alienation that he calls skepticism and credits Wittgenstein with illuminating (Reference Cavell, Bauer, Crary and Laugier2022b, 276–277).

Cavell held that Wittgenstein’s philosophy, with its integration of these liberating motifs, was of political moment. He turned to this topic in the late 1970s, at a time when he was rediscovering Ralph Waldo Emerson and taking a renewed interest in ethics. Combining ideas from Emerson and Wittgenstein, Cavell introduces a view of the moral life he dubs “moral perfectionism,” which opposes conceptions of it as a matter of rules-following, instead maintaining that it is always possible for developments of an individual’s sense of what matters to light up aspects of the world that challenge preexisting guardrails. Cavell took this to imply a fundamental criticism of his Harvard colleague John Rawls’s (Reference Rawls1971) influential interpretation of the liberal contract tradition.

Rawls offers a procedure for arriving at principles he believes capture the liberal democratic ideal of justice. But a community that is democratic in giving each of its members a voice cannot be circumscribed by Rawls’s (or other) principles. Cavell lodges this protest in reference to Wittgenstein’s reminders that our attunement to our words isn’t guaranteed and may shift. “One human being may be,” Wittgenstein cautions, “a complete enigma to another” (PI PtII, p. 225; Cavell Reference Cavell1979, 17–18). This point bears on any conception of political justice capacious enough to include members of historically oppressed and excluded groups. Those, like women, who have long been excluded, or only partly included, may find that nothing short of a rethinking of existing principles will suffice to adequately recognize their needs and aspirations (Cavell Reference Cavell1990, esp. 108). It is a mere rationalistic fantasy, and a dangerous one, to hold, with Rawls, that an individual or a society can arrive at principles that specify just conduct once and for all. Cavell derives from Wittgenstein’s philosophy a lesson about democracy as an endeavor more fragile, provisional, and demanding than liberal rationalism envisions. This is a crucial lesson in a world with many overlapping types of diversity and many grievous, historically sedimented injustices, and it is one that has been registered and developed by overlapping groups of commentators on Cavell’s Wittgenstein, such as, notably, Thomas Wallgren (Reference Wallgren2006), Andrew Norris (Reference Norris2017), and Jonathan Havercroft (Reference Havercroft2023) (also Rasiński et al. Reference Rasiński, Biletzki, Koczanowicz, Pichler and Wallgren2025), and democracy theorists (see Section 4).

Picking Up the Political Thread

In 1972, American political theorist Hanna Pitkin published Wittgenstein and Justice, the first book-length account of the significance of Wittgenstein’s philosophy for social and political thought. Pitkin had met Cavell at Berkeley in the late 1950s, where he was teaching, and she was a PhD student in Political Science. He introduced her to the methods of OLP, which would feature prominently in her scholarship. Her 1972 book, which draws heavily on Cavell’s unpublished 1961 dissertation, The Claim to Rationality (1972, viii), helped put Wittgenstein on the map for political theorists.

The core of Pitkin’s book is an anti-conservative, Cavellian story about the political significance of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. Pitkin tells us that, for Wittgenstein, language-learning proceeds through training that shapes our responses and “rests ultimately on our natural capacities” but doesn’t sacrifice objectivity (1972, 49 and 23). Wittgenstein’s appeals to ordinary language direct our attention to sensibilities we draw on in thinking and speaking (1972, 18–19). Since there is no question of imposing our everyday use of words as a standard, these appeals aren’t “a conservative defense of ordinary beliefs or common sense” (1972, 19; 139).

The main interest of Pitkin’s book lies in her remarks about the positive significance of Wittgenstein’s philosophy for political thought and political theory. She maintains that Wittgenstein’s view of language shows up shortcomings of the fact/value dichotomy that animates the idea that empirical and quantitative social scientific methods are invariably superior to normative and qualitative ones (Reference Pitkin1972, Ch10). She defends the work of Cavell, Winch, and others who take Wittgenstein to claim that the intentional categories we use for actions are irreducibly normative, and she argues that social scientific research benefits from thoughtful interplay between engaged, immanent methods and more abstract, quantitative ones (Reference Pitkin1972, Ch11–Ch12).

Pitkin’s achievement is having clearly raised the question of what a Wittgensteinian approach to political theory would look like. She herself holds that such a political theory “would presumably share his suspicion of broad, systematic generalization, his therapeutic stress on the particular case, on the investigating and speaking self, and on the acceptance of plurality and contradiction” (1972, 325). Despite the telling reasons she thinks we have to deny that Wittgenstein qualifies as a political theorist, she insists he resembles undisputed political theorists in illuminating “our troubled modern condition” and in combatting ills of modernity that stem from “increasing knowledge and objectivity, increasing detached scientific, rational awareness [and] increasing technological power to manipulate the world,” resulting in “our alienation from each other, our alienation from reality, and our loss of the capacity for action” (1972, 316). Subsequent thinkers have found Pitkin’s question about Wittgenstein and political theory “germinal” and “prescient” (Heyes Reference Heyes and Heyes2003, 7). It remains common for political theorists who turn to Wittgenstein’s philosophy to orient their projects by crediting Pitkin with pioneering steps in the field (e.g., Sluga Reference Sluga2011, 134; Sluga in Rasiński et al. Reference Rasiński, Biletzki, Koczanowicz, Pichler and Wallgren2025, 103; and Zerilli Reference Zerilli2023).

Re-Animating the World

One of the interrelated political morals Cavell draws from Wittgenstein’s later philosophy has to do with a lesson about the falseness of a disenchanted metaphysic and the need to recover an understanding of the world as a realm of value. Some thinkers who encounter this idea in Cavell’s writings, or in the writings of Anscombe, Foot, and Murdoch, further engage with Wittgenstein’s philosophy in investigating not only sources of philosophical resistance to conceiving the world as value-laden but also the transformative implications of this conception for how we understand the moral life. This includes American philosopher Cora Diamond.

It was at the insistence of a colleague at the University of Sussex that Diamond first read Cavell, his 1969 piece on David Pole (Cavell Reference Cavell1969c; see Diamond Reference Diamond2013b, 246–247), which set her on the path to immersion in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Despite earlier exposure to Wittgenstein and significant influence by Anscombe (Diamond Reference Diamond2001, 109), Diamond reports that it was only after reading Cavell’s early essay that she “first really got to Wittgenstein” (Reference Diamond2013b, 248).

Diamond’s Wittgenstein endeavors to dislodge the idea of a vantage point from which to discern that the stability of language depends on a prior reality. Wittgenstein wishes us to see that efforts to comprehend language’s workings are served by attending to our own habits of thought and speech and the world they illuminate. After sounding these themes regarding Wittgenstein’s later thought, drawing on the interpretative work of Anscombe, Cavell, and Rush Rhees, in the late 1970s, Diamond develops a reading of the Tractatus as anticipating Wittgenstein’s later output in trying to wean us from attempting to philosophize about language as if from a pure spectator’s position. Late in the 1980s, she began to collaborate with American philosopher James Conant, then a Harvard graduate student, in working her reading of the Tratatus into what is now known as the “resolute” reading.

Diamond writes extensively about ethics, and the heart of these writings is a conception of moral life informed by the image of language she inherits from Wittgenstein. Without reference to the idea of a supposed external outlook stripped of sensibilities characteristic of us as language-users, there is no warrant for insisting that the world to which our moral categories are responsible must be “hard” in the sense of “given for, or prior to, moral thought and life” (2010, 56). Rather, getting this world into view requires moral exertion. Diamond’s image of moral thought and action bears similarities to Murdoch’s, as she herself at times discusses (e.g., 2010 and 2014).

One of Diamond’s particular themes is the challenge, within ethics, of getting humans and animals into view. Moral thought is, she maintains, shaped by non-biological concepts of humans and of animals, mastery of which requires efforts of moral thought and imagination. We arrive at mastery by confronting and reworking our makeups with an eye to grasping oft-overwhelming aspects of animate existence, a task she at one point calls “the difficulty of reality” (Diamond Reference Diamond2003). Diamond wants to get us to grapple with this difficulty and see that “merely being human has a role in moral thought” (Diamond Reference Diamond1991b, 59) and, analogously, that animals “are not given for ethical thought independently of … a mass of ways of thinking about and responding to them” (Diamond Reference Diamond1991b, 327). She urges us to resist the shockingly prevalent idea that humans with grave cognitive impairments are morally less worthy. She describes how an imaginative sense of human life enters moral thought – and how the mere fact of being human has “a role quite different from that of properties like sentience or rationality or the capacity for moral personality” (Reference Diamond and Cockburn1991a, 59). She also brings out how thinking about animals can be suffused by a sense of them as fellow creatures, uncannily like us in their mortal adventures. For instance, she touches on poems by Walter de la Mare and discusses how he opens us to regarding a titmouse not as a merely biological thing but a “tiny son of life” (Reference Diamond1991b, 473–474).

These Wittgenstein-inspired motifs from Diamond’s work, together with congenial motifs from Cavell and also from British philosopher Sabina Lovibond (Lovibond Reference Lovibond1983), have for decades been resources for feminist efforts to meet the challenge of bringing into focus gendered and racialized social life with its systematic injustices (see, e.g., Scheman Reference Scheman1993; Crary Reference Crary2000a; O’Connor and Scheman Reference O’Connor and Scheman2002; Pohlhaus and Wright Reference Pohlhaus and Wright2002; Bauer Reference Bauer2015). In a more recent phenomenon, theorists draw not only on Wittgenstein and Wittgensteinian strands of thought from Diamond and Cavell, but on related strands of thought from Murdoch and Anscombe in contributing to feminist thought and politics (see Moi et al. Reference Bauer2015; Moi Reference Moi2017), including to the feminist ethics of care (see Laugier Reference Laugier2020; Braune et al. Reference Braune, Cabrera, Laugier and Trächtler2025). There is also an important literature on Wittgenstein, feminist epistemology, and feminist theory that developed largely independently of this body of commentary (e.g., Frye Reference Frye1983; Code Reference Code1991; Lloyd Reference Lloyd1995; Medina Reference Medina2013).

Additionally, a group of anthropologists and sociologists refer to works by Cavell and Diamond in searching for words adequate to capture not only the grievousness of some forms of violence but the sublime justice of some forms of goodness. This heterogeneous body of work, to which anthropologist Veena Das prominently contributes, gets put under the heading of “ordinary ethics.” This tradition, inspired by Cavell’s and Diamond’s readings of Wittgenstein, examines how moral life is enacted and sustained in everyday practices rather than through adherence to explicit rules. Ethical and political understanding is immanent in practices and sensibilities, accessible through attention to words and gestures in lived social contexts rather than through abstract principles (see, e.g., Braudel and Motta Reference Braudel and Motta2020; Das Reference Das2007 and Reference Das2020; Keane Reference Keane2015; and Lambek Reference Lambek2010).

Other noteworthy readers in the tradition of reading Wittgenstein’s philosophy as liberatory include David Wiggins (Wiggins Reference Wiggins1987) and John McDowell (Reference McDowell1998), who make use of themes from Wittgenstein’s writings in talking about non-disenchanted conceptions of ethical life, albeit without substantively addressing the conceptions’ political significance. McDowell sheds light on this picture’s epistemic side. On his fine-grained reading of Wittgenstein’s rule-following remarks (roughly PI §§138–242), they challenge a prejudicial image of rationality – the idea that grasping a rule is independent of any feel for what unites its applications, a matter of acquiring “a psychological mechanism … that churns out the appropriate behavior with the sort of reliability that a physical mechanism … might have” (1998, 58). McDowell illustrates this with Wittgenstein’s example of a simple arithmetic series (e.g., “+2”). If we conceive understanding mechanistically, producing a long sequence of correct numbers seems sufficient evidence of it. But, Wittgenstein shows, such a performance is compatible with not understanding the rule at all (PI §185). What does confer confidence in someone’s mastery, McDowell explains, is their practical engagement with the rule, their “feel” for it, expressed in ways not reducible to mere mechanical repetition (Reference McDowell1998, 58–59).

This argument resonates closely with Diamond’s and Cavell’s work. Rational understanding in general, like moral understanding in particular, cannot be detached from our practices and sense of what matters. McDowell’s analysis reinforces a broader Cavellian and Diamondian lesson about how valuing, understanding, and reasoning are inseparable from participatory, situated practices.

While McDowell’s commentaries on Wittgenstein generally stayed away from political questions, Cavell’s Harvard colleague, American philosopher Hilary Putnam, took a keen interest in the political implications of themes from Wittgenstein he had discussed with Cavell. Putnam engaged seriously with things Cavell, Diamond, McDowell, and Murdoch said about Wittgenstein and the limitations of a sharp divide between an allegedly value-neutral world of facts and a non-worldly realm of values (see Putnam Reference Putnam2002), and he discussed their bearing on political thought and theory. He wrote about, among other things, how a rigid fact/value dichotomy cramped twentieth-century interpretations of welfare economics (Reference Putnam2002, Ch4) and how it constricted the critical visions of some of his Frankfurt School contemporaries (Reference Putnam2002, Ch7). This last topic is one to which we now turn.

Desperately Looking for Left-Wing Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein has had a clear, if limited, influence on discussions of democracy and liberating thought within British and American philosophy. His broader legacy with progressive political theorists is less well known and sometimes missed, even by thinkers who inquire into it. Late in his career, British philosopher Bernard Williams published an article titled “Left-Wing Wittgenstein” reflecting on what he saw as a lacuna where Left-Wittgensteinianism should be. Williams was a student at Oxford from 1947 to 1951, where he worked with Anscombe, Hare, and Ryle. Writing in 1992, Williams surveys then-contemporary political philosophy by positioning Rawls and other “Kantian thinkers” in opposition to a heterogeneous group of “communitarian thinkers,” including Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre. The quarrel’s pivot is “the possibility, and basis of, critique” (Reference Williams2019 [1992], 324–6). The Kant-inspired positions are “untrue to a great deal of human experience,” operating with “too thin” and “abstract” an understanding of moral and political thought (Reference Williams2019 [1992], 324), but they at least seem to provide “leverage” for critically surveying local practices in a way that communitarians don’t (Reference Williams2019 [1992], 325–6). “Despite the efforts of some of his followers,” Williams announces, Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is taken to support communitarianism of a Right-wing and reactionary sort. Wittgensteinians attack the abstract rationalism of the Rawlsian approach without offering an alternative vision of critique, instead saddling us with a morass of incontestable difference and suggesting that critique of ethical practices is rationally “arbitrary,” noteworthy only in carrying “a substantive body of agreement with it” (Reference Williams2019 [1992], 327).

Williams wishes to expose the critical poverty of the work of Wittgensteinians but makes room for what he sees as the neglected critical potential of the later philosophy of Wittgenstein. “There could be,” he claims, “a Left-Wittgensteinianism” (Reference Williams2019 [1992], 329). This would be a stance grounded in the recognition that, although we must “understand from the inside, as anthropologists understand, a conceptual system in which ethical concepts are integrally related to ways of explaining and describing the world,” we must “be conscious that there are alternatives to any such system, and that there is a great deal of ethical variety” (Reference Williams2019 [1992], 328). The critical prospects Williams finds in Wittgenstein emerge “once [a] picture of ethical thought without foundationalism is made historically and socially realistic, in particular by registering in it the categories of modernity.” The result is the “possibility of deploying some parts of it against others, and of reinterpreting what is ethically significant, so as to give a critique of existing institutions, conceptions, prejudices, and powers” (Reference Williams2019 [1992], 329). Williams doesn’t elaborate on how he envisions Wittgenstein-style critique. It isn’t clear whether he means “internal critique,” the assessment of discourses in terms of one another in a manner with no claim to rational authority because it lacks a supposedly necessary “external” vantage point, or whether he means “immanent critique,” the development of engaged modes of assessment in a manner that lays claim to rational authority because its engagement is a mark of genuine thought, not a departure from it. It isn’t clear, that is, whether Williams is talking about an equivocal critical possibility of the sort that Malcolm and Rorty envision, or about the critical possibilities that Murdoch, Cavell, and Pitkin want us to pursue.

These ambiguities aside, Williams’s contention is that anti-foundationalist Left-Wittgensteinianism has no lineage. “The disposition of most of [Wittgenstein’s] followers not to go in this direction,” he muses, “is due to their refusal to think in concrete social terms” about their cultural and political circumstances (Reference Williams2019 [1992], 329). Williams fails to specify which Wittgensteinians he has in mind, an omission that is noteworthy given his long friendship with Cavell. Regardless of whether Williams aligns Wittgenstein’s thought with internal or immanent critique, the history is messier than he intimates. Apropos the former, there is Wittgenstein’s influence on Rorty and the liberal relativist tradition. Apropos the latter, there are, beyond Murdoch, Cavell, and Piktin, numerous contemporary thinkers. Within political theory, there is a tangled tradition of radical, immanently critical, Left-Wittgensteinianism.

It is not easy to trace this tradition. There are strands of twentieth- and twenty-first-century political thought and theory that might be counted as Leftist or liberating in virtue of being committed to promoting equity as a social ideal and to resisting those structures of capitalism that are most unjust and voraciously exploitative, extractive, and environmentally devastating. These strands of thought have largely missed their appointments with Wittgenstein. Key representatives of Frankfurt School Critical Theory and French Poststructuralism, two dominant Leftist movements in twentieth- and twenty-first-century political theory, have either been actively hostile to Wittgenstein or have argued for readings of his work that reinscribe the standoff Williams sketches. Once we see that this weary dialectic organizes major debates in political theory in the 1980s and 1990s, and that some political theorists who inherit from Wittgenstein lead us beyond the stalemate, we can recognize the possibility and timeliness of renewed calls for a Left-Wittgensteinianism or for a Wittgensteinian take on liberating critique.

At a time at which people and ecosystems the world over are devastated by ever-accelerating anthropogenic environmental degradation, an age characterized by staggering inequalities and authoritarians ever more fiercely committed to practices catapulting us beyond planetary boundaries, there is good reason to stress Wittgenstein’s conviction that a metaphysical shift is a prerequisite of making sense of who we are, what the world is like, and what it is to know it. This Element’s “new political Wittgenstein” is not just an insightful critic of a ubiquitous, scientistic, and techno-triumphalist worldview on which everything shows up as bereft of value and open to instrumentalization. He is not just a penetrating diagnostician of how such a worldview can infect our thought and our understanding of possibilities for solidarity and political community. He is, in addition, a guide to an alternative worldview that sheds light on forms of critique capable of enabling us to glimpse Earth’s glory, and on the splendor and fragility of democratic community within it, in time to stop all from being wholly lost.

False Starts and Dangled Threads

The earliest engagements with Wittgenstein by critics of capitalism – Marxists and first-wave Frankfurt School Critical Theorists – were not auspicious. In 1954, Lukács outrageously – albeit off-handedly and based only on a reading of the Tractatus – argued that Wittgenstein’s putative positivist “irrationalism” made him a participant in “the movement that culminated in Hitler” (Lukács Reference Lukács1980, 784). This, coupled with Marcuse’s (Reference Marcuse1964; see Section 1) poorly grounded savaging of Wittgenstein’s later writings, became the first in a series of failures to do justice to the spirit and political animus of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, though some later Critical Theorists made respectable attempts to read his work. In the late 1960s, Adorno took an interest in the Tractatus’s author, describing him as “the most reflective positivist” and the advocate of a flawed scientistic doctrine which nonetheless was superior to the Vienna Circle’s positivism in registering the “limit of logic” (Adorno Reference Adorno1976 [1969], 3, 20). Despite this qualified admiration, Adorno took the effect of Wittgenstein’s early work to be overwhelmingly damaging. The Tractatus’s legacy, Adorno wrote in the 1950s, was promoting an “anti-philosophical” quietism (see Adorno Reference Adorno and Tiedemann2008 [195–1956], 74). Later in life, Adorno gave the point a sharper spin. Wittgenstein, he claimed, had committed an “indescribable spiritual vulgarity” by limiting philosophy to what can “be expressed by means of concepts.” Thereby, Adorno alleges, Wittgenstein excludes attention to the sensuous reality that is essential to philosophy’s mission, and blocks liberating critique of advanced industrial capitalism with its oppressive tendencies (in Vallicella Reference Vallicella2009, 55–56).

An understanding not of the earlier but of the later Wittgenstein as a foe of critique inspired the 1972 establishment of the British journal Radical Philosophy, whose founding members report their concern with Wittgenstein’s influence, bemoaning the “conformist content of English philosophy [and] its piecemeal parceled-up character, its formalistic stress on ‘moves’ and ‘techniques’ of linguistic analysis, and its isolation from reality and living thought” (Radical Philosophy Group 1972, 30). Several early issues of the journal include discussions about the need to expunge any expression of the supposedly reactionary views of Wittgenstein and other ordinary language philosophers. Participants in these discussions included Jonathan Rée (Rée Reference Rée1972), Sean Sayers, and Bernard Harrison (Sayers and Harrison Reference Sayers and Harrison1974), and, however implausibly, a contemporary philosopher named Edmund Burke (Burke Reference Burke1975). Inspired partly by Gellner and Marcuse (see Sayers and Harrison Reference Sayers and Harrison1974, 36), their contributions amount to a clarion call against Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. The attack was both anticipated and later elaborated in the work of famous Marxist theorists. This includes Perry Anderson, who represents Wittgenstein as a conventionalist intolerant of any “external” criticism of language-games (1968, 19; 22–24), and Terry Eagleton, who agrees that, for Wittgenstein, a community’s practices provide the only justifications of how its members speak, though he diverged in representing Wittgenstein, Rorty-style, as open to revolutionary social transformations (1982, 69–71).

Around the same time, some prominent French political thinkers sang a sympathetic tune about the later Wittgenstein. The ground for this French reception was laid by philosopher and historian Pierre Hadot, who reviewed Wittgenstein’s works as they were published and who, in 1959, claimed, in a manner that anticipates Cavell, that the literary qualities of Wittgenstein’s philosophical œuvre are essential to its therapeutic aim (Hadot Reference Hadot1959; see Davidson Reference Davidson and Davidson1995, 17–18). In the early seventies, Marx-influenced sociologist Pierre Bourdieu began to draw on Wittgenstein’s later remarks on rule-following in developing a “logic of practice,” free from falsely idealized accounts of social necessity, which Bourdieu used to illuminate the reproduction of social hierarchies (e.g., Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1977[1972], 29–30 also Reference Bouveresse1990[1980], 9–10 and 18). Simultaneously, philosopher Jacques Bouveresse began to develop a reading of Wittgenstein’s later work, encompassing Wittgenstein’s account of rule-following, philosophy of mind, and conception of philosophical method, representing Wittgenstein as a critic of modernity’s ideas of social progress (e.g., Bouveresse Reference Bouveresse1973, Reference Bouveresse1987, and Reference Bouveresse2000), a set of commentaries that resonate today in writings of French feminist, philosopher and, theorist of care, Sandra Laugier, who also draws significant inspiration from Cavell (Laugier Reference Laugier2020). Also in the early 1970s, we’ll see, Jean-François Lyotard defended his account of Wittgensteinian postmodernism.

Despite these friendlier projects, some French thinkers sounded critical notes resonant with Wittgenstein’s reception by British Marxists, venting antipathy. Gilles Deleuze pontificated about “the Wittgenstein business” as a “philosophical catastrophe” and Wittgensteinians as “mean-spirited” “murderers” of philosophy (cited in Helgeson Reference Helgeson2011, 287). Alain Badiou combined a critical yet respectful account of early Wittgenstein as an “anti-philosopher” who repudiates philosophical utterances as nonsense, with a description of the later Wittgenstein as trading his sincere but misguided early efforts to grapple with philosophical difficulty for chatter about the use of language no better than relativizing, anthropologizing sophistry (Badiou Reference Badiou2011, 138–139).

Like these oppositional gestures, efforts at a sympathetic, critique-oriented reading of Wittgenstein can be traced to initial sites of the reception of his thought. One oft-overlooked progenitor is Italian Marxist philosopher Ferruccio Rossi-Landi. Rossi-Landi was in Oxford from 1951–1953, where he worked on semiotics and had a “happy, brief liaison” with Murdoch (Conradi Reference Conradi2001, 339). He participated in the excitement of May 1, 1953, when the newly printed Investigations was sold in Oxford and Anscombe gave a lecture on what she saw as some of her translation’s flaws. In 1966, a quarter century before Williams lamented the virtual absence of Left-Wittgensteinianism, Rossi-Landi made his first of several attempts to develop a “Marxian” reading Wittgenstein (also Rossi-Landi Reference Rossi-Landi and Petrilli1992 [1979], Ch4). His goal, perhaps influenced by Murdoch, was to free Wittgenstein’s work from ahistorical tendencies of English philosophy and recover from the Investigations a lesson about language he believed complemented a Marxian theory of society (Rossi-Landi Reference Rossi-Landi, Kitching and Pleasants2002 [Reference Rossi-Landi, Kitching and Pleasants1966], 199).

In contrast to first-wave Critical Theorists, Rossi-Landi read the author of the Investigations as developing a linguistic version of a “non-mechanistic materialism” capable of serving as a tool for liberating critique (Rossi-Landi Reference Rossi-Landi, Kitching and Pleasants2002, 209–210). Wittgenstein foregoes transcendent abstractions and focuses on concrete contexts in which words have meaning. Rossi-Landi is struck by the idea of parallels between this account of linguistic meaning and Marx’s account of commodities. Just as Marx holds that objects depend for their constitution and value as commodities on their role within a dynamic system of production for profit, the Investigations’ scenes of the everyday return us to the sites of communal existence and public life, where words derive their constitution and value through social exchange (see Rossi-Landi Reference Rossi-Landi, Kitching and Pleasants2002, 202). And, just as Marx teaches that, under conditions of capitalism, workers are estranged from the commodities produced by their collective labor, Wittgenstein shows that, under the influence of empiricist understandings of meanings as things independent of the lives of speakers, we are estranged from our own words. The Investigations is a brilliant “critique of linguistic alienation in general and of linguistic-philosophical alienation in particular” (also Rossi-Landi Reference Rossi-Landi and Petrilli1992, 103). Its image of language as a communal concern undermines views of linguistic possession as a private acquisition, and Rossi-Landi notes that this antipathy to private language echoes Marx and Engels’s insistence, in The German Ideology, that “language, like consciousness, arises only from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men” (cited in 2002, 205). Wittgenstein contributes to social thought by directing us toward the socio-historical conditions in which words are coined and used, thus making room for revolutionary forms of thought.

Rossi-Landi’s praise of Wittgenstein is qualified. His remarks develop the theme that Wittgenstein’s thought lacks historical sensitivity and is “divorced from reality” (Rossi-Landi Reference Rossi-Landi, Kitching and Pleasants2002, 209) in a way that blunts it as a weapon against linguistic alienation. He concludes that, although Wittgenstein’s work should “find a place in a general criticism of ideologies” (Rossi-Landi Reference Rossi-Landi, Kitching and Pleasants2002, 200), it is incomplete and needs a Marx-style theory of society to orient it. “Marx gives the indispensable theoretical framework,” Rossi-Landi quips, “Wittgenstein particular elaborations of it applied to language” (Rossi-Landi Reference Rossi-Landi, Kitching and Pleasants2002, 210).

Rossi-Landi appears to have assumed that politically relevant explorations of linguistic practices would have to be genealogical, tracing historical uses of words and furnishing answers to the question “how was this word originally produced?” (Rossi-Landi Reference Rossi-Landi, Kitching and Pleasants2002, 208). This leaves no room for linguistic investigations to challenge capitalist modernity by contesting ideologically central conceptions of what language is like, and of what sort of world it reveals. Yet it is impossible to make sense of Wittgenstein’s efforts to grapple with “the darkness of this time” (PI, p.4) within this conceptual space. Wittgenstein introduces language-games whilst sketching a portrait of the modern subject that, in Cavell’s words, “contains issues of diversity and anxiety and sickness and torment” (Cavell Reference Cavell2012, 2). Rossi-Landi’s neglect of the historical reference of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy reflects a failure to plumb the depth of Wittgenstein’s rebuke to empiricism. This leads Rossi-Landi to an account of emancipatory Wittgensteinianism that retains the characteristically modern, disenchanted worldview that Wittgenstein subjects to devastating criticism. Its core is the contention that Wittgenstein lacked a true (Marxist) science of society. Rossi-Landi thus resembles Williams in combining a suggestive claim about the prospects for a Left-Wittgensteinianism with an unsatisfactory story about how Wittgenstein’s later philosophy might inform critique.

Nevertheless, Rossi-Landi contributes something important by emphasizing Wittgenstein’s circle of Marxist friends. Rossi-Landi opens his Reference Rossi-Landi, Kitching and Pleasants1966 piece on convergences between Wittgenstein and Marx with a commentary on a passage of the Investigations’ Preface in which, after crediting British philosopher and mathematician Frank Ramsey with helping him to realize “grave mistakes” in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein says he owes yet more to exchanges with Italian Marxist economist Piero Sraffa whom he credits with “the most fruitful ideas of this book” (PI viii; cited in Rossi-Landi Reference Rossi-Landi, Kitching and Pleasants2002, 196). Rossi-Landi interviewed Sraffa in November 1960, hoping to understand his effect on Wittgenstein’s thinking (Rossi-Landi Reference Rossi-Landi, Kitching and Pleasants2002, 201), a topic that had then already attracted significant attention (see Malcolm Reference Malcolm1958, x and 15–16). Wittgenstein’s conversations with Sraffa, a close friend of Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, were of interest to Rossi-Landi because they establish that Wittgenstein was close to Marxist intellectuals in England throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Subsequent scholars have elaborated this biographical theme, noting that Wittgenstein knew and interacted with Russian Marxist classicist and linguist Nikolai Bakhtin and British Marxist classicist George Thompson, as well as with Fania and Roy Pascal, the former of whom taught Wittgenstein Russian in the 1930s and the latter of whom, Fania’s husband, was a literary theorist and translator of an abridged edition of Marx and Engel’s The German Ideology (see Gakis Reference Gakis2015, 928–929; Janik Reference Janik1985, 148; Kitching Reference Kitching2002, 7–8; and Monk Reference Monk1990, passim).

Several of the philosophical threads Rossi-Landi dangled were picked up by subsequent scholars (see e.g., Giddens Reference Giddens1979, esp. 4 and Kitching Reference Kitching2002, esp. 10–11), including by a succession of Italian Marxists (see e.g., Ponzio Reference Ponzio and Petrilli1990, 117ff; Gakis Reference Gakis2020, Reference Gakis, Rasiński, Biletzki, Koczanowicz and Wallgren2025). Rossi-Landi had a point when, in 1979, he declared the “quasi-paradoxical truth that Italy is the most ‘Wittgensteinian country’,” in virtue of his philosophical and political reception there (Rossi-Landi Reference Rossi-Landi and Petrilli1992, 91). This Italian lineage, traceable through to prominent political philosopher Antonio Negri (Negri Reference Negri2004), merits a place in any account of critical Wittgensteinianism.

Across the rest of continental Europe, however, prevailing political and philosophical headwinds were still largely inimical to Wittgenstein through the 1970s. This didn’t start to change until the early 1980s, when Wittgenstein’s later work became central to a debate between the leading figure of the second generation of Frankfurt Critical Theorists, Jürgen Habermas, and the pioneer of Poststructuralism, Jean-François Lyotard. Habermas and Lyotard enlisted the later Wittgenstein for deeply divergent political projects – the former to rehabilitate an Enlightenment vision of political rationality free from domination, the latter to challenge the feasibility of such a grand narrative and to usher in a postmodern embrace of post-Truth diversity.

Habermas Breaks a Spell in Frankfurt

In his earliest encounters with Wittgenstein, Habermas adopted the standard line of the Frankfurt-based Institute for Social Research’s tradition of Critical Theory. Self-avowed Critical Theorists had different understandings of the “critical enterprise,” but Wittgenstein was, early on, regarded by all as anathema. Habermas expressed this antipathy in a 1964 letter to Siegfried Unseld, the then-head of Suhrkamp and de facto gatekeeper to post-war German philosophy (see Blom Reference Blom2002). Asked for recommendations for a new philosophy series, Habermas mentioned ancient and early modern philosophical authors as well as contemporaries. Among the contemporaries, he proposed analytic thinkers such as Hare and Winch, but cautioned against Wittgenstein, opining that “the conservatism of the old (i.e., later) Wittgenstein causes enough harm as it is (in Germany)” (cited in Müller-Doohm Reference Müller-Doohm2016, 102–103).

Throughout most of the 1960s, a central preoccupation of Habermas and other Critical Theorists was denouncing the deleterious effect of positivism on the social sciences, a project that put them at odds with Karl Popper and the German analytic philosopher Hans Albert (see Adorno et al. Reference Adorno1976). Disagreeing on many things, the disputants agreed in resisting the early Wittgenstein’s influence. A shared concern of the Critical Theorists was methodological. The spread of Wittgenstein’s ideas, they feared, was turning the social sciences into narrowly empirical endeavors uninformed by socio-historical analysis, obscuring our need to reckon, normatively and historically, with the nature of human interests, power structures, and the social-material nature of knowledge production.

By the late 1960s, Habermas lauds the later Wittgenstein for using reflections on language-learning to demonstrate an irreducible tie between languages and forms of life (Habermas Reference Habermas, Nicholsen and Stark1988a [1967], 132). Wittgenstein abandons the positivist idea of a “monopolistic language of the natural sciences” and embraces a linguistic “pluralism” on which “the language of the natural sciences is … one language game among many” (Habermas Reference Habermas, Nicholsen and Stark1988a [1967], 126). But he remains positivistic in ways that make this gesture anti-critical. He adheres to an immanent strategy of analysis via the perspectives of participants in language-games, asking us to analyze natural languages with their own expressions so that “the understanding of language is trapped in a circle” (Habermas Reference Habermas, Nicholsen and Stark1988a [1967], 133). This disempowers critique because Wittgenstein “remained positivistic enough to think of this training process as the reproduction of a fixed pattern, as though socialized individuals were wholly subsumed under their language and activities” (Habermas Reference Habermas, Nicholsen and Stark1988a [1967], 149).

Habermas grew more admiring of Wittgenstein in the 1970s, perhaps under the influence of Rorty, whom he first met in 1974 and subsequently became friends with (see Müller-Doohm Reference Müller-Doohm2016, 181). Habermas, in this period, elaborates his mature view of Critical Theory in a manner that sheds light on how he came to see Wittgenstein as an ally.

The need for Critical Theory is, Habermas tells us, heightened by the post-World War II intensification of the modernizing trend toward separating traditionally interwoven cultural spheres of science, art, morality, and law. This deprives value-spheres of their world-oriented role in legitimating outlooks, undercuts the scientistic view it generates, and, with dysfunctional economic structures, creates a “legitimation crisis” (Habermas Reference Habermas1988b [1973]). Critical Theory can yet manage by studying language (see Habermas Reference Habermas1988b [1973], xiv) because there is a telos to language, namely, “coming to an agreement,” which, as an original linguistic mode, amounts to a rational form of critical reflection. Studying language uncovers universal types of legitimation and completes “the unfinished project of modernity” (Habermas Reference Habermas1981 [1980]). The moves we make toward “coming to an agreement,” for him, the paradigmatic form of linguistic exchange, advance three “validity claims” and invite assessment in three dimensions. They can involve claims to rightness or norm-conformity in interpersonal relations; claims to the truth of representations; and claims to a speaker’s subjective sincerity (Habermas Reference Habermas1984 [Reference Anscombe1981], 306–308, 329). We ordinarily don’t question the validity claims that utterances advance. We mostly accept these claims, staying in the conventionality of a “lifeworld” (Habermas Reference Habermas, Thompson and Held1982, 271–272). But it is always possible to question speech acts along one of the three axes and segue to an activity of asking for reasons that transcends ordinary linguistic practices and affords a nonconventional, critical perspective on them (1984, 16–18; 317–318). This activity, for Habermas, “discourse,” is, in his eyes, the legitimating enterprise of Critical Theory, and, by the late 1970s, he sees Wittgenstein as an accomplice in clarifying the enterprise’s nature.

Habermas rightly reads Wittgenstein as breaking with positivistic, representation-focused conceptions of language (Habermas Reference Habermas1984 [Reference Habermas1981], 95–97). Wittgenstein takes practical responses to contribute directly to linguistic understanding, nurturing the appreciation of an open-ended array of linguistic practices, such as “making up a story … play-acting … guessing riddles, making a joke … asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying” (PI §23). But there is no suggestion in Wittgenstein that the things we do with words raise precisely three types of validity claims. Nor is there any suggestion that the assessment of claims our speech acts do raise is a rationality-certifying activity categorially different from our conventional practice-based traffic in words. The idea that everyday language requires an external source of support seems plausible only on the assumption of a supra-conventional vantage point for thought, of the sort supposedly supplied by Harbermasian “discourse,” from which ordinary language seems rationally deficient. But Wittgenstein holds that, when we appeal to such a transcendent stance, we are confused about what we are doing, and that it is this disorientation that makes us imagine we have grounds for impugning ordinary language simply because it is practice-based. To enlist Wittgenstein in a quest for rational foundations of everyday language, as Habermas does, is to miss the philosophy of Wittgenstein.

Habermas treats claims to rightness, truth, and sincerity as rationality-defining dimensions of supra-conventional assessment. The individual who questions these claims may be impugned as irrational and uncooperative. This rationalistic vision risks excluding the voices of those whose concerns can’t be articulated in its terms, a danger acute in reference to individuals and groups historically excluded from the project of European modernity he hopes to complete (e.g., those subject to overlapping race-, Indigeneity-, sexuality-, gender-, and disability-based marginalization). Here, Habermas invites the charge that Cavell levels at Rawls’s liberal rationalism, that is, disfiguring the legitimating, democratic community he wants to safeguard.

Habermas believes activities of “discursive” justification bring functional economic systems and ordinary life-worlds together in a manner unthreatening to the latter because governed by rational agreement. This appeal to rationality-establishing “discourse” is foreign to Wittgenstein, who tries to wean us from the view that legitimate thought cannot reveal a value-saturated terrain. Habermas, in contrast, sees the forfeiture of such a terrain as part of a properly “postmetaphysical” posture (Habermas Reference Habermas1992). The metaphysic he rejects is, notably, central to the work of early Frankfurt School thinkers Adorno, Marcuse, and Horkheimer. These thinkers defend worldly values endangered by positivist encroachment and economic overreach (Marcuse Reference Marcuse1964; Adorno and Horkheimer Reference Adorno, Horkheimer and Noerr2002). While overlooking the political import of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, Habermas takes Critical Theory in a rationalistic direction, at odds with founding members’ core insights.

Any historically informed account of the political Wittgenstein must reckon with Habermas, for it was his reconstructive appropriation that introduced Wittgenstein to many political theorists. The terms on which Habermas enlisted Wittgenstein, linking ordinary language philosophy to a theory of communicative rationality, set the agenda for subsequent engagements. Yet post-Habermasian Critical Theorists have engaged little with Wittgenstein. Even works whose titles use Wittgensteinian terms of art, such as Axel Honneth’s Struggle for Recognition: Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Honneth Reference Honneth and Anderson1996) and Rahel Jaeggi’s Critique of Forms of Life (Jaeggi Reference Jaeggi2018), make either no reference to Wittgenstein or only parenthetical remarks. And Wittgenstein is absent from agenda-setting Critical Theory handbooks (e.g., Thompson Reference Thompson2018; Best et al. Reference Best, Bonefeld and O’Kane2018), despite valiant efforts to fix the oversight (see Brill Reference Brill1994; Pleasants Reference Pleasants1999; Owen Reference Owen2002).

This may be because the image of Wittgenstein that Habermas promulgated is of a proponent of a rationalistic universalism, and because Habermas thus integrates Wittgenstein’s work into the canon of Critical Theory at the cost of sapping some of its political provocativeness. Hostility to this deflation is a theme of the work of one of Habermas’s outspoken critics of the 1970s and 1980s – Jean-François Lyotard – a thinker who took Wittgenstein’s concept of the language-game to gesture toward an alternative politics for the Left.

Lyotard Paints Wittgenstein Postmodern

Lyotard’s 1979 The Postmodern Condition, a genre-defying report “on knowledge” for the Québecois Government, starts from an analogue of the Habermasian idea of a legitimation crisis. For Lyotard as well, modernity comes with the splintering of traditional explanatory narratives, a process in which science is disaggregated from legal, aesthetic, and other cultural domains and in which the authority of all these domains, science included, is undercut (Lyotard Reference Lyotard1984 [1979], 6–9). He believes the right response to the loss of premodern foundational narratives is not to join modernity’s quest for non-foundational meta-narratives, aimed at Truth, but to adopt a postmodern attitude of “incredulity toward meta-narratives” (Lyotard Reference Lyotard1984 [1979], xxiv). He thinks Wittgenstein’s later philosophy provides a roadmap for this project, avoiding any sort of modern meta-narrative and introducing, via the “language-game,” the notion of language as a “heterogeneity of elements” (Lyotard Reference Lyotard1984 [1979]). To speak of language-games is, Lyotard believes, to represent discourses, whether science, law, art, or morality, and so on, as game-like in being “defined in terms of rules specifying their properties and the uses to which they can be put” (Lyotard Reference Lyotard1984 [1979], 10). We indulge fantasy if we seek truth by asking language-games to “legitimate their own rules” in a game-transcendent way (Lyotard Reference Lyotard1984 [1979], xxiii); we do better to recognize that “legitimation can only spring from [our] own linguistic practice and communicational interaction” (Lyotard Reference Lyotard1984 [1979], 41). This Wittgenstein-inspired notion of language-games remains important for Lyotard and, several years after The Postmodern Condition, he publishes a dialogue with philosopher Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming (Lyotard and Thébaud Reference Lyotard and Thébaud1985) that aims to realize and elaborate the notion via a rereading of Kant’s Third Critique.

Habermas’s discourse theory is one of the modern meta-narratives in the critical sights of Lyotard’s Wittgensteinian postmodernism (Lyotard Reference Lyotard1984 [1979], vii–viii, xxv, 65, 72–73). Lyotard observes, contra Habermas, that consensus is “only a particular state of discussion, not its end” (Lyotard Reference Lyotard1984 [1979], 65), and he represents Wittgensteinian postmodernism as standing in criticism of the idea of the “collective (universal) subject that seeks its common emancipation through regularization of the ‘moves’ permitted in all language games” (Lyotard Reference Lyotard1984 [1979], 66). The complaint against Habermasian universalist rationalism that Lyotard is lodging is ethico-political. Such rationalism is, to use one of his terms of art, “terroristic” in promoting subservience to its principles at the expense of those of other linguistic practices. The worry, which Lyotard also addresses elsewhere (see Lyotard and Thébaud Reference Lyotard and Thébaud1985 and Lyotard Reference Lyotard1988 [1983]), is not only that it veers toward excluding a plurality of voices but that it creates conditions in which efforts of those excluded to give expression to the wrongs they suffer seem unreasonable and incoherent.

Lyotard’s Wittgenstein-influenced view closely resembles the view Habermas ascribes to Wittgenstein in the late 1960s, a view on which the meanings of expressions are determined by their places in a language and on which efforts to criticize them are caught in a disabling circle (see Habermas Reference Habermas1988). Because this Wittgenstein leaves no foothold for rational critique, the bearing of his thought appears conservative from Habermas’s perspective. Lyotard places a different spin on the matter. Although for Lyotard’s Wittgenstein, linguistic practices only admit of criticism on their own terms, they are “agonistic” in the sense of being perennial fights to outmaneuver one another (1984, 10). Our social fabric is constituted by contingent, temporary agreements to continue playing that can always rupture, and there is no obstacle to agitating for liberating social change (1984, 41).

Lyotard’s Wittgenstein indexes critique to the rules of language-games and insists on the ability of language-games to change in emancipatory ways. But this liberating tilt is tenuous. Lyotard’s Wittgenstein condemns Justice, together with Truth, to banishment with modernity’s grand narratives (1984, xxiv), leaving the former notion perilously devoid of content. In contrast, Wittgenstein rejects the idea of an external vantage point from which to impugn the rational credentials of ordinary modes of thought about justice and truth, leaving intact the everyday, daunting project of pursuing unqualified versions of these notions.

Lyotard is not regarded as an authority on Wittgenstein today, but his reading influenced subsequent poststructuralists’ attitudes toward Wittgenstein and, as Chase (Reference Chase, Chase, Floyd and Laugier2022) documents, it has “permeated the public consciousness” (2022, 92). Its resemblance to Rorty’s reading is a clue that something is amiss. Lyotard doesn’t do sufficient textual work, and it is impossible to square his post-Truth stance with details of Wittgenstein’s writing (Read and Uçan, Reference Read and Uçan2019). He combines an exegetical carelessness with a dangerously constrained space for critique. We are left to cross our fingers that our embrace of plurality will arc toward justice. Having evacuated from our practices any propensity to reveal the world as it is, it is difficult to distinguish liberating accounts of discourse and community from Alt-Right and other visions of politics as tribalist and inevitably violent power plays.

Here we hit a stand-off between competing cases for critical Wittgensteinianism, between rationalist-universalist (Habermas) and postmodern (Lyotard) proposals. This confrontation prompted a flurry of publications that, in the 1980s, briefly situated Wittgenstein at the heart of some Leftist political theory conversations (see, e.g., Bernstein Reference Bernstein1985). But just as post-Habermasian Critical Theorists lost contact with Wittgenstein, so too did post-Lyotardian Poststructuralists. No other cornerstone works of French Poststructuralism engage with Wittgenstein. Michel Foucault cited Wittgenstein only once in his œuvre; Jean Baudrillard was silent on Wittgenstein; and Jacques Derrida insisted that he was no Wittgenstein scholar (see Helgeson Reference Helgeson2011). And some in this tradition, like Deleuze and Badiou, went on to forcefully disparage Wittgenstein. While many factors contributed to Wittgenstein’s departure from these conversations, one of significance is that Lyotard’s reading of Wittgenstein, like Habermas’s, bears only a passing resemblance to the original.

Defending Democratic Community

Already in 1986, Australian philosopher Paul Redding points out that Wittgenstein is a false term in the quarrel between Habermas and Lyotard. Redding observes that these two thinkers fundamentally converge in their readings of Wittgenstein. They agree that “if we accept our language-games as they are, we will be somehow caught inside them, trapped by the historically contingent rules constituting them.” They also agree that, for genuine critique to be possible, “some point of view outside the actual rules of historically given language-games must be found” (Redding Reference Redding1986, 21). This pair of assumptions is the backdrop to their argument. Whereas Lyotard is unwilling to allow for a standpoint for rationality external to “that which is defined by the facticity of our current language-games” (Redding Reference Redding1986, 19), Habermas searches for external normative grounds for critique, ultimately offering them in the form of “a set of universal pre-conditions required for the playing of language-games per se” (Redding Reference Redding1986, 21). After sketching the “axiomatic” view of language-games that informs both thinkers’ accounts, Redding notes that twenty years earlier Cavell had shown that it figures in Wittgenstein’s writings as a critical target (Redding Reference Redding1986, 20). Cavell brought out that, for Wittgenstein, mastery of language draws on routes of feeling we acquire in learning to speak and isn’t explicable in terms of strict rule-following. He stressed that our tendency to insist that language-games require an external grounding for their critical power shows a refusal to reconcile with the rough-and-tumble of human language. Echoing Cavell, Redding says the point is not to embrace irrationality but to recognize that rationality is “not grounded in pre-given criteria” (Redding Reference Redding1986, 22), and he redirects the search for a liberating Wittgenstein along more promising avenues.

One political philosopher who began exploring these avenues is Canadian James Tully. In an incisive 1989 paper (reprinted in Heyes [ed.] 2003 and Tully Reference Tully2008), Tully, who completed his PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge, where Wittgenstein had been based, sets out to show that our political life does not need to be grounded on a foundational form of critical reflection to be legitimate. Ordinary political life consists of a “motley” of critical-reflective discursive activities and practices that can be free and rational – such as “deconstruction, evaluation, explanation, genealogy, interpretation, interrogation, justification, representation, survey, validation, verification, and so on” (Tully Reference Tully1989, 198). No single form of critical reflection can, must, should, or might serve as a foundation for all the others. In Tully’s hands, Wittgenstein becomes a political discourse phenomenologist, reminding us of what our ordinary practices of debate and reaching political agreement are like. For any such activity to get underway, we must operate with a feel for what’s important. Tully criticizes Habermas’s discourse approach by imagining a Habermas who asserts “I am Jürgen Habermas” and considering how to ground such a claim. Any attempt to do so (by, e.g., asking others, checking his passport, consulting the library) may hit upon the question: Why take this evidence as authoritative? (Tully Reference Tully1989, 179–83). It’s not that all there is is agonistic struggle, pace Lyotard, but that we ourselves have no clear idea what it would be to get beyond “customary usage” to some inviolable, neutral foundation. A background of normative agreement structures our political discussions, guiding our sense of what does and doesn’t need justification. This agreement – which, we saw, Wittgenstein refers to as agreement in “form of life” (PI §241; OC §358) – is only confusedly conceived as grounds to stop an infinite regress, since it can and does break down, and since “when it is reasonable to raise doubt and when it is not is itself not fixed beyond question” (Tully Reference Tully1989, 184). Recognizing that nothing sustains these practices apart from our going on with them – that we live exposed to experiences that challenge our sense of how to go on, and that there is no “sharp line” neatly distinguishing such experiences from the stable everyday (Z §393) – is “difficult,” says Wittgenstein (OC §166), while Cavell calls it “terrifying” (Reference Cavell1969c, 52). Tully’s Wittgenstein, like Cavell’s, reminds us of the fragility of political forms of life and their constitutive practices. He reminds us of the standing possibility that we may find our spade turned (PI §217) and be thrown back on the need to look for novel paths to tread together.

These reflections suggest the need to rethink what a political community or polis should be, a task Tully undertakes in a powerful set of lectures delivered at Cambridge in 1994. He asks how “a modern constitution [can] recognize and accommodate cultural diversity” (Tully Reference Tully1995, 1), partly with a view to discrediting entrenched modern theories of constitutionalism, from Hobbes to Rawls, that treat “agreement reached in dialogue … as foundational, universal and the fixed background to democracy” (Tully Reference Tully1995, 135). Tully orients this project with an observation about the oft-overlooked variety of political struggles that prompt talk of diversity, including overlapping and internally heterogeneous nationalist, supra-nationalist, intercultural, feminist, and Indigenous movements (Tully Reference Tully1995, 2–3). Tully’s preferred theoretical model for a just constitutional order capable of accommodating this “strange multiplicity” is Wittgenstein’s image of rule-following with its at times shifting background of practical agreement. This model is an improvement on classic theories, since it acknowledges that interpretative disagreements may always “arise over how to apply and follow the conditions” for the interpretation and application of the general terms of constitutionalism (Tully Reference Tully1995, 106). It registers that constitutional democracies’ claims to equity and justice are functions of being in this sense works-in-progress or, to use Cavell’s category, perfectionist enterprises. Tully frames his lectures by proposing that the contemporary problem of constitutionalism be “approached from the perspective of the struggles of Aboriginal peoples” (Tully Reference Tully1995, 4), and he asks us to regard a famous sculpture, Bill Reid’s The Spirit of Haida Gwaii, as emblematic of the constitutional associations he admires. Tully proposes that this sculpture, which features a canoe with thirteen mythic creatures, invites us to see the survival and flourishing of its passengers as depending on their listening to each other, as opposed to assuming “the habitual imperial stance” of tuning out (Tully Reference Tully1995, 24), their endeavoring “to see their association from multiple viewpoints” (Tully Reference Tully1995, 25), and their accepting that “[t]here is no transcendental standard beyond the canoe from which [equity and justice] can be measured” (Tully Reference Tully1995, 27). That is Tully’s Wittgensteinian conception of democratic constitutionalism, and it stands, alongside contributions of Murdoch, Cavell, and Pitkin, as a vision of the possibility, nature, and appeal of Wittgensteinian democratic constitutionalism.

One of the most high-profile thinkers to employ Wittgensteinian motifs to criticize deliberative democracy à la Rawls and Habermas is Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe. Mouffe had already taken an interest in Wittgenstein’s notion of the language-game as a guide to democratic discourse in the mid-1980s, when she was working with Argentine political philosopher Ernesto Laclau on a theory of “radical democracy” (Laclau and Mouffe Reference Laclau and Mouffe1985). A decade and a half later, Mouffe continued to develop her early treatment of these themes, now partly inheriting from Cavell’s and Tully’s criticisms of the rationalistic strains in Rawls and Habermas. Following Tully, Mouffe argues that constitutional principles aren’t rationality-ensuring standards that somehow apply themselves in a manner that alleviates us of the need to navigate discord and secure community (Mouffe Reference Mouffe2000, 71–72). Following Cavell, Mouffe claims that rationalistic conceptions of moral consensus invariably risk depriving some individuals of “a voice in the conversation of justice” (Mouffe Reference Mouffe2000, 76; Reference Mouffe1999, 750). One of Mouffe’s notable contributions is bringing out, in conjunction with these thinkers, how and why rationalistic views distort political understanding. We reach agreement not by jettisoning value-soaked outlooks for sterile principles but by becoming, in Cavell’s argot, “attuned” in our judgments. To speak of attunement is to speak of an affective dimension of politics that Mouffe calls an “ethos” (Mouffe Reference Mouffe2000, 69), and she stresses that sustaining a democratic ethos requires attention to the passional and conflictual character of democratic discourse.

When Mouffe elaborates on this “agonistic” character, she presupposes classical metaphysical renderings of ideals of rationality and truth. So it appears to her that agonism is in tension with these ideals themselves (see, e.g., Mouffe Reference Mouffe2000, 68; Reference Mouffe2005, 121; Reference Mouffe2022, 32). This represents a break both from Wittgenstein’s suggestion that concepts like “truth” have uses as humble as those of ordinary empirical words like “table” (PI §97) and from the interpretative insights of Cavell and Tully that Mouffe elsewhere inherits. This issue aside, Mouffe has been a force, as a mentor and institution-builder, in generating discussions about using Wittgenstein to theorize democracy.

An additional contribution to Left-Wittgensteinianism aligns Wittgenstein with another iconoclastic twentieth-century political thinker, Hannah Arendt. In two books written over the past decade, political theorist Linda Zerilli explores two key categories from Arendt’s thought – judgment and truth – in each case identifying lines of filiation between Arendt and Wittgenstein. Arendt held that “the capacity to judge is a specifically political capacity” (Arendt Reference Arendt2006, 221), and, in A Democratic Theory of Judgment, Zerilli undertakes to elaborate on this Arendtian idea with an eye to underlining the significance of judgment for “democratic societies beset by deep value pluralism” (Zerilli Reference Zerilli2016, xii). Zerilli observes that Arendt does not accept a familiar science-indexed metaphysic that seems, in the eyes of liberal political theorists like Rawls and Habermas, to confront us with the need to adjudicate incommensurable value judgments (Zerilli Reference Zerilli2016, 2). Rather, Arendt resembles Cavell in holding that “[o]nly a creature that can judge of value can state a fact” (Cavell Reference Cavell1979, 15, cited in Zerilli Reference Zerilli2016, 14). Arendt thinks that debate, the lifeblood of politics, is only possible if individuals have a common world, and she takes judging to be constitutive of such a world (e.g., Zerilli Reference Zerilli2016, 10). Zerilli suggests we can grasp Arendt’s point if we bring her reflections together with Wittgenstein’s remarks in the Investigations about how agreement in form of life or judgments is essential to language (PI §§241–242). With nods to Cavell, Pitkin, and Winch, Zerilli argues that Wittgensteinian forms of life are dynamic in ways that illuminate how a diverse community can shift its background of judgment, as envisioned by Arendt, to include plural voices.

More recently, in A Democratic Theory of Truth, Zerilli discusses convergences between Wittgenstein and Arendt on the notion of truth. Arendt believed that “[e]very claim to absolute truth … strikes at the very root of all politics” (Arendt Reference Arendt2006, 229; cited in Zerilli Reference Zerilli2025, 4), but she combined hostility to abstract, indifferent truth with the conviction that run-of-the-mill factual truths make up the common world of democratic debate. Noting a further striking parallel with Foucault’s efforts, late in his career, to exchange self-determining truth for ordinary “games” of truth (Zerilli Reference Zerilli2025, 3; Foucault Reference Foucault2016), Zerilli proposes that we approach an understanding of the messy truths Arendt sees as politically indispensable by following Wittgenstein in wresting ourselves free of the illusion that we can survey language while bracketing sensibilities we acquired in learning it (Zerilli Reference Zerilli2025, 129–130). Zerilli thus explains what we learn from Arendt about the political importance of truth, an undeniably important lesson at a time of new fascist efforts to destroy truth, by showing that the same moral is in the philosophy of Wittgenstein. One result of Zerilli’s two-part project is a case for taking Wittgenstein’s thought to be decisively important for democratic theory.

Taken together with the work of Murdoch, Cavell, Pitkin, Diamond, and others who accent liberating motifs in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, the writings of Tully, Mouffe, and Zerilli illustrate the emergence of a Wittgensteinian-democratic tradition in political thought. A fuller sketchbook of the scene, reaching beyond this slender Element, would do well to include thinkers who sound Wittgensteinian themes in contributions not only to ethics, epistemology, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and legal philosophy but to critical philosophy of race, critical environmental studies, critical animal studies, and other critical theories devoted to the kind of emancipatory thought Wittgenstein’s philosophy is often thought to undercut. It would also do well to include thinkers who use Wittgenstein in pursuing liberating critique, outside philosophy and political theory, in literary theory and religious studies, as well as in anthropology and sociology. When, in the early 1990s, Williams lamented the dearth of accounts of what he called Left-wing Wittgensteinianism, he missed the beginnings of the tradition he was after. But he rightly anticipated that, when it emerged, it would be well worth looking into.