Hanna Pitkin's Wittgenstein

Abstract

Hannah Pitkin’s Wittgenstein and Justice stimulated new approaches within social science. She did this not so much by offering a normative political reading of his philosophy, as some critics charge, but by drawing out the capacity for critique in his self-described ‘new style of thinking’. It is this critical style that drew the ‘small d’ democratic theorist Pitkin to Wittgenstein, rather than any normative conclusions about how things really are (e.g., always in flux) or how language really works (e.g., as a tool), as it may initially appear. Although she certainly extracted possibilities for social change out of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, Pitkin oriented herself toward the form of critical thinking that his writings modeled. In so doing, she brought Wittgenstein into the extant critical debate about positivism in social science and opened new possibilities for democratic political theory.