Abstract

It has been notoriously difficult to link Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work to the agendas of academic political theory. While this is in part due to his style of writing and the absence of an explicit discussion of politics, his commitment to the irreducibility of conventions is difficult to reconcile with the search of many political theorists for both criteria of political essentiality and a basis of cognitive privilege that would underwrite a vision of critical and normative inquiry. Although political theory is characteristically drawn toward the literature of philosophy in search of identity and images of epistemic authority, Wittgenstein’s work subverts the search for the universality of both politics and political inquiry. It is, however, possible to perceive in his work a positive valence for both a vision of political inquiry and criteria of democracy