Abstract

Ludwig Wittgenstein was a force in two of the most important trends in twentieth century philosophy: logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy. Yet, his work has had little influence on the discourse of contemporary political theory. This study opens with an examination of the reasons for Wittgenstein's minimal impact on theorizing. Academic political theory is founded upon, and identified with, the "Great Tradition" of Western, epic political thought. Plato exemplifies its panoramic vision. The activity of theorizing in Wittgenstein's writings, however, is non-epic, unheroic, and ordinary. Theorizing, in Wittgenstein's call to return words to their ordinary contexts and uses, requires no special training, vocation, or technical vocabulary. Rather, it is a mundane activity carried out by humans confronted by ambiguous, complex rules of language and society in their everyday existence. In Wittgenstein's philosophy, theorizing is what all humans engage in when they feel lost or unsure of their next step. Theorizing is how we organize what we have learned about, and through, ordinary language: it is a narrative about how we see ourselves as members of a language community. ;This description of theorizing emerges in Wittgenstein's explorations into the pragmatics of language acquisition. We learn language through life-long encounters with the language-games that compose ordinary language. Politics is one, contingent, aspect of this public language system. Wittgenstein did not explore politics in his writings, but his conception of language as a constellation of forms of life and language-games provide broad hints of how theorists perceive politics from a position of immanence. Further, the description of ordinary language gives way to what a Wittgensteinian theory of politics would look like. To flesh this vision out, I present a comparison and partial synthesis of Wittgenstein's latter philosophy and the political theory of anarchism. Finally, I consider what structural effects this political vision--a variation on pluralism--may have on academic political theory