Complementary Visions of Language, Practice, and Convention

Though there is no direct biographical or textual link between their respective projects,Footnote ⁷ if one looks at the world through the respective conceptual lenses fashioned by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Michael Oakeshott, one sees strikingly similar pictures.Footnote ⁸ Each viewed the human world not as an inert array of discovered and immutable fact, but rather as an understood world, hard won through the circumstantial utterances and actions of countless individuals. What is more, the utterances and actions of persons are inexorably structured by the conceptual-practical framework that (following Wittgenstein) one could simply call language. That is, for Wittgenstein and Oakeshott, the human world is a world in language—understood, inhabited, and experienced through the inexorable mediating influence of concepts and practices whose use constitutes language use in the broadest sense. According to this perspective, to look systematically at the world is to scrutinize, more or less explicitly, the conceptual and practical frameworks of language that overlay and organize it in experience. The study of human conduct requires attention to language use, and parsing human conduct into various domains means investigating various practices of language use engaged in by individuals in the contingent circumstances they encounter. Thus, for Wittgenstein and Oakeshott, the regularities and systematic structures of the world we understand and act within are (intelligible as) the regularities and systematic structures of language. The later careers of both Wittgenstein and Oakeshott are projects of applying this general perspective to a variety of intellectual domains, questions, confusions, and problems, on topics ranging from logic, mathematics, and skepticism, to history, politics, and theories of action. For present purposes I need only to sketch the contours of the linguistic perspective that I argue these two thinkers share, and that informs and suffuses their respective works.

First, the great diversity and complexity of conduct, different kinds of utterance and action in different kinds of circumstances, can be understood perspicuously in terms of different idioms of language use. Oakeshott commonly referred to such idioms of speaking and acting as “practices,” while Wittgenstein gave them the name “language-games.” Practices or language-games are the conceptual-practical structures that frame and ground understanding and agency—they are, so to speak, the air that understanding and agency breathe. Wittgenstein never offered a systematic definition of a language-game, though much of Philosophical Investigations and posthumously edited and published works such as On Certainty and Zettel consist of demonstrative reflections on language-games. Nevertheless, one could say that for Wittgenstein a language-game is an acquired or learned technique of thinking and acting.Footnote ⁹ Cast in this light, utterances and actions are uses of a technique, an agent following and drawing upon one or another linguistic practice. Somewhat more precisely and systematically, Oakeshott states that a “practice”

Though their formulations differ in terminology and systematicity, both view the structure of utterance and action in terms of techniques of language use. Borrowing again from Oakeshott, practices or language-games specify “arts of agency” that individuals employ in conduct as they craft themselves, their actions, and their world (OHC, 59). Though these techniques are in some ways constraining, in the sense that they regulate as well as constitute idioms of activity, they are not scripts to be parroted. A competent language user is the “master of a technique” that constitutes and adverbially conditions a “capacity” (Können) for intelligent choice and action (PI, §199).Footnote ¹¹ Thus viewed, a practice or language-game is “an instrument to be played upon, not a tune to be played” (OHC, 58). To speak and act is to make use of the arts of agency afforded by the language-games one has mastered; to understand or make sense of the actions of others is to understand or make sense of the linguistic practices they use, the language-games they play.

Second, Wittgenstein and Oakeshott recognize the intersubjective, social dimension of language-games. As Wittgenstein puts it, our linguistic practices rest upon and illustrate a broadly social, intersubjective substrate which he calls our “forms of life” (PI, §§241–42).Footnote ¹² That is, our language-games and the arts of agency they constitute and regulate are conventional or customary to a group of language users. Such arts of agency are in the first and most important instance learned (often ostensively) from others who are already mature users (or “masters”) of the respective techniques (PI, §§5–9; OHC, 57). Wittgenstein discusses how language is learned quite extensively in the Philosophical Investigations, and Oakeshott also emphasizes the sense in which individuals are initiated into the practices contained in and conveyed by convention and tradition (e.g., OHC, 88–107). An initiate into a language-game (whether a child or an adult) learns from already initiated practitioners, and hence learning language-games has an ineluctably social, intersubjective dimension.Footnote ¹³ The arts of agency are acquired and mastered through life inter homines, as conventional techniques are disseminated from adepts to initiates. In addition to how we learn of language-games, the uses we make of them have an enduring conventional, social aspect. We speak and act either directly with or indirectly with respect to others (even the imagined other who “hears” what one “says” to oneself), addressing ourselves through the use of learned conventions of practice to a world of other agents. Even when an agent speaks or acts privately, in physical isolation from others, the practices she uses in some way presuppose and are conditional upon the intersubjective context in which she is situated as a language user. Though each agent's act is “ineluctably his [or her] own” in respect of authorship, the felicity of any particular utterance or action has a social, conventional dimension, which further means that even the most singular act takes its place within a larger field of custom shared with others (OHC, 53).

Third, the practical aspect of language-games as techniques and their conventional aspect as social institutions meet in the rule character of language-games. Both Wittgenstein and Oakeshott describe the acquisition and use of language-games in terms of rules and conventional techniques, presenting rules and rule following as the conceptual core and paradigm case of language use.Footnote ¹⁴ Mastery of a language-game entails mastery of the rules that structure the game, even if one did not learn the game by memorizing rules and does not practice it by self-consciously recalling and interpreting rules. Philosophical Investigations deals repeatedly with how rules subtly structure language-games, and serve as primary vectors along which convention travels in our linguistic practices (e.g., PI, §§80–90, 150–243). The “private language argument,” for example, can be read in part as a refutation of the proposition that some (i.e., “private”) language-games float free from intersubjective rules and conventions (PI, §§244–318).Footnote ¹⁵ “Our talk gets its meaning from the rest of our proceedings,” and this larger context is conventional, which means intersubjective and social.Footnote ¹⁶ Oakeshott likewise identifies a conventional, customary background of our linguistic practices, which he describes as “a capital that has been accumulated” over many years, which agents draw upon, participate in, and contribute to in their utterances and actions.Footnote ¹⁷ This social background comprises “languages of self-disclosure and self-enactment” which are possessed only in virtue of being learned, and learned only in virtue of being shared with others as customary idioms of conduct that stretch across generations (OHC, 59). In an ineluctable yet not exhaustive sense, every manifestation of individual agency—from playing a game of chess, speaking English, and voting in an election—is describable in terms of rule following, adherence to and attunement in conventions and institutions shared with others.

The linguistic pictures of Wittgenstein and Oakeshott lend themselves easily to social theories of agency, which stress the external, intersubjective conditions of individual agency. On a cursory review, Wittgenstein and Oakeshott appear to present (or at least to offer the resources to maintain) social theories of agency that reckon convention both the form and the matter of individual action. Accordingly, one might infer that Wittgenstein and Oakeshott understand individual agency as the residue or side effect of social institutions or intersubjective processes. The individual agent, one might say, exists only in a derivative sense—an evanescent ripple on the surface of the deep water of community, custom, and convention. Such readings have found receptive audiences in philosophy and political theory,Footnote ¹⁸ yet I will argue that such readings are textually tenuous, conceptually inadequate, and both philosophically and politically misleading. I believe that despite the foregoing sketch, Wittgenstein and Oakeshott share a fourth route of affinity, a fundamentally individualistic perspective on agency situated within the context of social practices, and I shall argue that this perspective not only is consistent with the conventionality of language-games but in fact contributes to a more robust and sustainable understanding of the life and force of conventions. Though I do not suppose myself to offer a refutation of the reading that I ultimately reject, my argument against it takes a fresh view of Wittgenstein, Oakeshott, and their complementary insights for political thought.

Conservatism and Individualism

How one reads Wittgenstein with respect to language and agency inexorably shapes the political availability and valences of his work. As a rule, to read Wittgenstein as offering a social theory of agency carries a range of conservative consequences in application to political theory, whereas reading him as offering an individualistic theory of agency carries individualistic, liberal (though, I shall argue, less than radical) consequences. Although a rough investigation and analysis of a conservative reading of Wittgenstein and its political implications could be undertaken fruitfully without any reference to Oakeshott, considering Oakeshott as a kindred thinker with regard to language and agency is warranted for at least two reasons. First, Oakeshott is often drawn into conversation with Wittgenstein by precisely those thinkers who offer a conservative reading of Wittgenstein, in service of a social theory of agency. Challenging such a reading thus benefits from considering both thinkers, and I shall argue that both thinkers are misrepresented by the conservative reading. Second, as Wittgenstein left us no political theory, the implications of his work for political theory are inevitably extrapolations. Yet Oakeshott's political work is extensive. If, as I have suggested, Oakeshott and Wittgenstein share a number of fundamental perspectives regarding language and agency, then Oakeshott's political thought might be instructive regarding how to understand the implications of Wittgenstein for political theory. I am not suggesting that Wittgenstein's philosophical perspectives on language and agency necessitate the set of theoretical positions on politics that Oakeshott happens to espouse. Rather, I mean only to suggest that Wittgenstein's contributions to political theory (as speculative and wrought as they necessarily must be) shall likely bear a distinct resemblance to Oakeshott's—as if though singing different melodies, they nonetheless harmonize.

I will sketch what is perhaps the dominant conservative reading of Wittgenstein and Oakeshott, which is articulated in the work of J. C. Nyíri and David Bloor, and which attributes social theories of agency to both Wittgenstein and Oakeshott. I will then offer an alternative reading that is, I argue, a more faithful rendering of Wittgenstein and Oakeshott, and provides a more coherent sense of how the intersubjective and individual aspects of language and agency are interwoven in their works. This prepares the ground for a reevaluation of the political implications drawn from the conservative reading.

Convention, Forms of Life, and Conservatism

Both Wittgenstein and Oakeshott describe a dimension of conventionality to how language is learned and used that locates the individual agent within a dense network of practices or language-games that she draws upon in her actions. Using these practices, playing these language-games, entails the expression of (almost always implicit) agreement or attunement with other language users with whom the individual shares forms of life and a cultural capital. Any attentive reader of Wittgenstein and Oakeshott must, I think, come to some such conclusions. However, the further specification of the arguments that lead to these conclusions and the implications these conclusions have in political theory can send one off in different directions, despite this initial agreement.

The readings of Wittgenstein and Oakeshott articulated by J. C. Nyíri and David Bloor are similar enough in argumentation, textual interpretation, and political implications that I will treat them as a single view, which for simplicity I will refer to as the conservative reading.Footnote ¹⁹ The core of the conservative reading and its social theory of agency may be simplified (and occasionally elaborated on its advocates' behalf) into the following form.

1. 1) Individual agency is conceptually and practically framed by language, such that agency and action are inseparable from language use.

2. 2) Language (in the formal abstract) and language use (in the concrete) consist of social, that is, intersubjective and conventional, practices.

(As I suggested earlier, these are neither controversial claims about Wittgenstein and Oakeshott, nor do they entail a social theory of agency or conservative implications for political theory.)

1. 3) Beyond the formal sense in which language use consists in using ineluctably social practices, the conservative reading maintains that individual language use consists in following the empirically settled and verifiable rules, customs, and conventions of some community; some “we” of which the relevant “I” is a member.

2. 4) Clarifying and amplifying the sense of “following,” the conservative reading asserts that meaningful individual utterance and felicitous individual action is the reproduction of custom. For example, adding correctly means to do what others do, or would do, according to a shared rule, such that the real criterion of an individual's doing or saying something correctly is that she does or says what conforms to the form of life of the community.Footnote ²⁰ In support of this interpretation, the conservative reading focuses upon Wittgenstein's remarks about following rules and conventions blindly (e.g., PI, §§185–219), and Oakeshott's early discussions of tradition (e.g., RP, 5–69), and interprets these as evidence that what an individual says and does is intelligible only insofar as it blindly reproduces custom.Footnote ²¹ Wittgenstein's remarks that “something must be taught us as a foundation” and that one's “life consists in [one's] being content to accept many things” come to mean that an individual's ideas, utterances, and actions are essentially the repetition of what has been inculcated in her by her elders (OC, §§449, 344; see RP, 62).

3. 5) Individual agency is therefore a rigidly if not exhaustively socially determined capacity to follow the customs and conventions of one's community. Competent, intelligible individual action manifests only and exactly in doing and saying what some community, some “we,” does and says. According to Bloor, Wittgenstein “was remorseless in stressing the priority of society over the individual” in just this sense, and in Nyíri's words, “any human being must, in order to be a human being, be constrained by some form of life, by some network of tradition” immanent to her community, which in word and deed she reproduces.Footnote ²²

If one reads Wittgenstein and Oakeshott in this way, then the political implication follows that individual agents are as such incapable of gaining critical purchase by word or deed upon the community to which they belong. The conservative reading pictures the individual constrained by her inherited conventions of thinking and acting in a way analogous to how a person on holiday in a country whose native language she does not speak is limited to the phrases in her travel phrase-book. She must use her inherited conventions whole cloth, for these conventions have been taught to her as a foundation and are for her the horizon beyond which she cannot see. The combinations she composes out of these inherited stock-phrases may be novel, but only trivially since what she means and does in her thoughts, utterances, and actions is determined externally and in advance by the conventions she reproduces (and indeed must reproduce) blindly and by rote.

As Nyíri interprets the political implications of the conservative reading:

The conservative reading of Wittgenstein and Oakeshott simply “gives the critic no room.”Footnote ²⁴ In more expressly political terms, the criticism of one's own society is vacuous on the conceptual level and fruitless on the practical level. The impossibility of real criticism stems, say Nyíri and Bloor, from the fact that to make an intelligible claim is to play a language-game; to play a language-game is to follow rules and conventions of one's society (in the sense outlined at 4 above); hence a genuinely critical stance or act toward one's own society inveighs against its own conditions and undermines itself. The critic either falls into incoherence and imbecility (insofar as she goes off the rails of convention that keep her in agreement with the society she would criticize) or ends up unwittingly justifying the very arrangements she intended to challenge (insofar as making an intelligible claim or coherent argument requires adherence to the body of custom and convention that she meant to criticize). In either case, Nyíri supposes that “‘nonconformism’ is an anthropological absurdity” because intelligibility to others and robust conformity to the conventions of one's community are both empirically and logically inseparable.Footnote ²⁵

Language Use and Critical Agency

On the conservative reading, one is left with the view that a community's stock of linguistic practices is integral, internally coherent, and mutually supporting, much like smoothly aligned bricks in a wall. The entirety of a community's language-games is harmoniously arranged such that each conceptually supposes and practically affirms the others. There is no room for critical agency because the harmony latent and manifest within the assemblage of practices is at once necessary, stable, and complete. Although the conservative reading has been challenged,Footnote ²⁶ I believe that the full implications of its rejection or refutation have yet to be fully explored and appreciated. This gap leaves underdeveloped the ways in which Wittgenstein and Oakeshott speak to questions of freedom, authority, law, and critique in political theory and practice.

Instead of rehearsing arguments that have been offered against the likes of Nyíri and Bloor, I would like to offer an alternative that reverses the method of the conservative reading. In effect, Nyíri and Bloor pose the question “Can one criticize one's own society?” and draw a negative conclusion based on their interpretations of several of Wittgenstein's remarks on culture, forms of life, conventions, and rules, supplemented by a handful of Oakeshott's arguments against what he called “rationalism.” Yet the conservative reading starts from a position of feigned ignorance, doubt, or open-mindedness (as if the guiding question was not already adequately and conclusively answered by real practice) and proceeds to derive a denial from an absence. The absence of a robust and explicit theorization of individual critical agency in selections of Wittgenstein's and Oakeshott's work is presented as a denial or refutation of the intelligibility and even possibility of meaningful criticism of one's own society in word and deed.

Contrary to the conservative reading, I suggest that it would be more faithful to the method and spirit of Wittgenstein's and Oakeshott's work to abandon the feigned (and, in Wittgenstein's sense, overly “philosophical”) ignorance or doubt regarding the possibility of critique, and analyze earnestly the facts of the matter. Start neither from the question whether critical agency is possible, nor from a hypothesis that it is possible, but from the patent fact that individuals engage in a host of “everyday practices of criticism”Footnote ²⁷ of the rules, conventions, and forms of life of the community or society of which they are competent members. The relevant question then becomes “How do Wittgenstein and Oakeshott equip us to give account of this fact?” Proceeding in this fashion, not only does one see that the conservative reading is misleading in its assumptions and nonsensical in its conclusion, but one also sees more perspicuously the individualistic implications of Wittgenstein's and Oakeshott's complementary views of language and agency.

Bernard Williams's essay “Pluralism, Community and Left Wittgensteinianism” furnishes an example of such an approach to the issue of critical agency. Williams begins from the fact of a pluralistic society in which there is fundamental agreement on some practices yet deep and meaningful disagreement on others. He subsequently challenges the alleged necessity of “undiscriminating acceptance of whatever conceptual resources of the society actually exist” that is posited by the conservative reading.Footnote ²⁸ Williams argues that Wittgenstein's insights on the conventionality of our linguistic practices would admit the possibility of genuine individual critical agency within the network of our language-games and forms of life. Within the network of practices, there exist spaces within which one practice may be used to gain critical purchase upon others, even to “combat” others (OC, §609). Recognizing the fact that “people have found [within the rules and conventions that they share with others] resources with which to criticize their society,” Williams claims that on a Wittgensteinian view (with which I have shown Oakeshott to agree) “practice is not just the practice of practice, so to speak, but also the practice of criticism.”Footnote ²⁹ The general attunement in forms of life, in modes and acquired dispositions of conduct, might shape or constrain the domain of critical agency, but such attunement does not negate critical agency.

As I have discussed, the conservative reading supposes that one must accept the entirety of the practices of one's society in order to use any particular practice contained therein. No doubt, Wittgenstein recognized that conventional attunement and stability are necessary in order for our practices to hold good, so to speak. However, the foundations of our practices consist in general patterns of conventional attunement and stability, not total conformity in each and every individual instance. For example,

The individual agent, in order to be a competent language user, must generally manifest attunement with some form of life shared with others. Yet it is not necessary that each and every one of her actions manifest complete attunement or conformity with the entire body of empirical (or normative) judgments of her community. Once we come to some such realization regarding Wittgenstein's view of language and agency, “we shall have less temptation to assume that [the set of practices we share with others] is a satisfactorily functioning whole; and we shall be more likely to recognize that some widely accepted parts of it may stand condemned in the light of perfectly plausible extrapolations of other parts.”Footnote ³⁰ What an individual shares with others who have been initiated into the same practices is not a “stock” of phrases, actions, or procedures to repeat, but a “capital” composed of the various arts of agency whose use individuals have learned (RP, 187). For an individual to be a competent practitioner of any of these arts, she must on the whole be attuned with other practitioners. Yet, as William Connolly has argued, the practices in which we are attuned may be deeply contested, despite being generally shared.Footnote ³¹ An individual may use some of the arts that she has mastered to work upon others, to challenge their current projections, to foreclose some routes of use while nonetheless pursuing what Oakeshott called the “intimations” and “flow[s] of sympathy” latent in our shared practices (RP, 57–69). An individual may engage in genuine criticism without stepping outside the context of shared practice, and thus falling into unintelligibility or performative contradiction. Rather than dismissing genuine criticism as an “anthropological absurdity,” Wittgenstein and Oakeshott give rich accounts of its conditions and potency.

One of Wittgenstein's best-known remarks should, I believe, be read as I have just suggested—as a comment upon the individuality of agency despite the social context in which the individual is situated as a language user. In section 217 of Philosophical Investigations, in the course of remarks on the grounds of rule-following as a central element of language use, he says:

One might read this, following Nyíri and Bloor, as the inevitable conclusion that when the justifications we can articulate come to an end, the only explanation for why we act as we do is that others in our community act this way. “This is simply what I do” becomes shorthand for “I learned the ways of my community and cannot see or imagine beyond them; if pressed to justify my words and deeds, their deepest grounds consist in the raw fact that members of my community speak and act in this way; I can and would do no other.” As I have suggested, the conservative reading arrives at such exhaustively social interpretations of language use and agency by mischaracterizing the ways in which language-games and our attunement in playing them hang together. Contrary to the conservative reading of “This is simply what I do” as total capitulation to the ways of the community, I suggest an individualistic reading that is, to my mind, a more coherent interpretation of Wittgenstein and Oakeshott.

Language-games do not fit smoothly into a singular edifice shared evenly and completely by the members of the linguistic community, but are instead at best partially and complexly interrelated. Analogously, the instances of individual language use need not fit smoothly into a singular, organic pattern of utterance and action shared evenly and completely by the members of the linguistic community. (At some level, what I am describing conforms to the Saussurean distinction between individual speech [parole] and conventional language [langue].Footnote ³² The former admits of individuality and variation, while the latter is a body of rule-articulated conventions shared and followed by speakers. Yet, as I am presently suggesting, Wittgenstein's picture admits greater room for individual variation and critical agitation in language use than the Saussurean structural model of linguistics allows.) It is consistent with Wittgenstein's treatment of rules and conventions of rule following to say that agency is thoroughly conditioned by intersubjective practices and patterns of behavior, yet that agency is still at its core individualistic. An individual can use the language-games of her linguistic community correctly while still making novel uses of the practices she has mastered, and even while using one practice to challenge or disrupt others. A given practice can be the site of critique and contestation even as (and among) individuals (who) use it competently.

The individual's relation to the community (which is more complex than the conservative reading allows) could be further elaborated by picturing how language-games are in fact learned. For example, I did not learn how (and when and why) to make and keep promises by observing and being trained to mimic what “the community” or some notional “we” says and does. Instead, I learned practices of promising from particular individuals, my mother and father, my siblings, my friends, my teachers (e.g., OC, §§128–30, 140; see OHC, 87). These individuals did not themselves reproduce what “we” or “the community” say and do, but what they individually understood to be promising, practices they learned from individuals like themselves, and so on. Instead, language use is always what particular individuals say and do, who are never mere members of some notional “we” that shares foundational practices, patterns, and dispositions of action.Footnote ³³ Yes, we must be able (in rare cases, not in ordinary ones) to appeal to what some notional entity beyond ourselves says and does, such as when we are misunderstood, or when we are challenged. However, as Hilary Putnam has it, “our attunements enable us to understand ‘what is going on’; they are not facts that we appeal to in going on.”Footnote ³⁴ That is, when I engage in a language-game, such as promising, I do not in effect report the presence of a verifiable, empirical thing called “our form of life” or “our attunement in what constitutes promising,” nor do I assume that such an object would be there if I looked.Footnote ³⁵ Instead, I enact a capacity; I make a promise; I express it in the way I learned from other individuals and that has become natural to me; I follow the rules and enact myself according to the technique of the language-game, “blindly,” inasmuch as I do not question what is natural to me (PI, §219). My ordinary lack of hesitation in speaking and acting, that I need not and generally do not consult a rule book or empirically verify “our” attunement in practices of promising, illustrates not that I already have such an empirical validation of what “we” say and do, but that only the rarest cases call for such validation. Wittgenstein thus offers a commentary on the naturalness to us of our linguistic practices, rather than a statement of the imperiousness of community and its rules over what and how we do.Footnote ³⁶

Even if we accept this individualistic picture of unproblematic, ordinary language use, Nyíri and Bloor may still appear to have the edge when an individual's aberrant use of a practice is, as it were, called before the community of speakers for judgment. It may seem that critical agency evaporates precisely when the individual turns a practice against the normal ways of the community. Yet this fallback conservative position likewise rests upon what I believe is a misreading of Wittgenstein and Oakeshott. Even in cases of irregularity or dispute, validation from the community is not necessarily the last word, or the judgment from which we have the most to learn. In the final instance, when dispute over the use of a practice remains and explanations have been exhausted, “This is simply what I do” means something like “This is how I take the world to be.” When explanations come to an end there is no deeper or more objective bedrock to which I can refer than how I take the world, how I live in it.Footnote ³⁷ Wittgenstein and Oakeshott each acutely recognized that there is no ground to human community deeper than our attunement in practices, but for each individual practitioner no ground is more fundamental than her own understanding of and ways of enacting the practices she has learned. Our agreement in forms of life (from adding numbers in the same ways, to finding humor in the same things, to believing in the dignity of sentient beings) is broad and profound, but around the edges we are not in perfect or exact or explicit agreement; we can generally share forms of life and language-games and still encounter confusion, misunderstanding, and genuine, intelligible disagreement.Footnote ³⁸

Rejecting the conservative reading means abandoning one conceptual picture of language use and agency for another, and here a metaphor may prove useful. Individual language users may be pictured as akin to swimmers adrift in a boundless, bottomless sea. The conservative reading of Wittgenstein and Oakeshott pictures these individuals staying afloat by clinging to a raft that they all share; to let go of the raft is to drown. According to this image, individual language users must obediently reproduce the conventional ways in which the community speaks and acts, and to stray is to fall into infelicity and unintelligibility. The critic is thus pictured as the one who lets go, and either repents his hubris or sinks into silence. On the alternative reading that I am presenting, individual language users could be pictured as akin to swimmers adrift in the same boundless and bottomless sea, staying afloat not by clutching to the raft at all costs (i.e., adhering blindly to common patterns of behavior), but instead staying afloat by individually using strokes that they have learned from other individuals. The strokes an individual knows and uses might be shared almost exactly by other individuals, and might have only distant relatives in the practices used by some others. Many different kinds of strokes will serve to keep these individual agents afloat, and all that is required is that the various strokes used by individuals bear degrees of family resemblance (PI, §§67–77). Analogously, individual language use and agency can be understood as individuals variously using practices in ways that need only share significant family resemblances to the uses made by others. Individual agents may share remarkably significant patterns of conduct without all being locked into blind reproduction of what “the community” says and does. Wittgenstein remarked that even in normal cases, “of course, this [e.g., my usage, my action, my claim, my judgment] is also in agreement with other people; but I agree with them” (OC, §281).Footnote ³⁹ As Richard Flathman interprets the affinities between Wittgenstein and Oakeshott on this very point, even rules, which are seemingly the most rigid structures of shared linguistic practices, “take the agent by the elbow, not by the throat…; the most tightly integrated system of norms and rules leaves scope for variations in conduct.”Footnote ⁴⁰ One might conclude with Colin McGinn that “insofar as [Wittgenstein] has a view on the individual/social opposition, he is an individualist.”Footnote ⁴¹ This is not to discount the social dimensions of language use and agency, but to take a perspective on them that prioritizes the individual as a linguistic agent.

Conditional yet Critical Agency

My purpose for engaging and subsequently rejecting the conservative reading is twofold. First, somewhat academically, I believe that the reading spreads an inaccurate picture of two significant thinkers. Conservative readers of Wittgenstein and Oakeshott correctly suppose that the political significance of their work is rooted in their understandings of language use and agency. Yet conservative readers take the conditions of individual agency to be rigid boundaries, and thus overplay the constraining effects of intersubjective practices. Second, careful examination and rejection of the conservative reading better illuminates the views that Wittgenstein and Oakeshott properly espouse, and some of the political potencies of their reflections on agency and practice. With a more accurate and tenable understanding of their respective works and the affinities between them, we can better appreciate what they intimate about political thought and practice.

Although there have been numerous thoughtful attempts to show the critical voices of Wittgenstein and Oakeshott,Footnote ⁴² interpreters have not always appreciated the complexity of the balance between the social and individual aspects of language use, and have tended (in some cases) to arrive at majoritarian or radical interpretations of Wittgenstein's political import.Footnote ⁴³ I have attempted to develop a modest, middle position which pictures the agent neither as radically detached from the practices she uses in her self-enactments (a position that both Wittgenstein and Oakeshott clearly reject), nor as strictly determined by these practices (as the conservative view maintains). I need only establish the plausibility of this modest position in order to show that Wittgenstein and Oakeshott hold open space for meaningful critical agency.

Perhaps the most apt analogy that Wittgenstein offers to explain the conditionality of our language-games, and thus of the agency practically structured by them, is the analogy to the hinges of a door. Explaining his notion of the fundamental grounds of our linguistic practices, he says:

This of course does not suggest that some features of our forms of life are forever and with necessity insulated from meaningful critique. It is not, in the example of American politics, that certain political principles like freedom or equality or popular sovereignty or due process of law are always and everywhere the load-bearing points of the rest of our political system, which therefore cannot be meaningfully criticized or challenged. We can easily imagine and identify situations in which such principles do enjoy this status, but propositions and principles serve as hinges (rendered beyond doubt and meaningful critique) only episodically and in particular contexts. In the context of voting rights, the principle of equality might be a hinge upon which the debate turns—to question or criticize equality in this context is not impossible but self-defeating. The insight that Wittgenstein and Oakeshott offer here is not that some propositions and principles are and must remain simply beyond criticism (as Nyíri and Bloor suggest), but rather that ripping at the hinges is fruitless in just those contexts in which we want the door to turn. Calling an element of our practice into question requires a context in which the question is intelligible, and such a context is framed by concepts, facts, and techniques that are not (and for the moment cannot) be called into question. When Wittgenstein says that “my life consists in being content to accept many things,” this does not mean that anything must be accepted once and for all, nor does it in any way guide us with regard to what must be accepted in any context, but only reminds us that at every moment, in every contingent context, there shall be some things that one must simply accept if one is to push practice and inquiry onward (OC, §344; see §403). Every one of our practices can be subjected to profound criticism, though within contingent limits of occasion, orientation, scope, and depth.

The point is that to use our practices critically, we must at the same time affirm their conditionality upon other parts of our conventional practices. These are the hinges that must stay put, if the door is to turn. In order to question your calculations I must (for now) accept our practices of mathematics, let them stay put. I could of course challenge them, but only in a context in which these practices are not a fundamental supposition of the critical inquiry itself. In order to question the meaning of our political rights in a juridical setting I must leave the Constitution in place, so to speak. I must allow it to serve, as it conventionally does, as a foundation of our political rights. In other contexts I could critically examine and challenge the Constitution in the most fundamental terms, but for now, in this context, it is a hinge for our political and legal practices. Read in this way, Wittgenstein and Oakeshott provide the resources with which to affirm critical agency, while stopping short of radicalisms that suppose that criticism can be freed from its underlying conditions, and can turn upon any practice, in any way, at any time.

To some what I am suggesting might seem a conservative alternative to an archconservative position. However, the reading of Wittgenstein and Oakeshott that I have suggested breaks cleanly from the two main political implications of the conservative reading. As exemplified by Nyíri and Bloor, the conservative reading leads to: (1) the blanket dismissal of criticism as a meaningful activity (and even dismissal of critics as competent language users), and (2) the blanket affirmation of whatever conventions and practices exist for a given community (simply because these exist).Footnote ⁴⁵ The individualistic reading that I have articulated undermines both of these implications. Criticism is a mode of activity that draws upon the resources of some of our practices to call into question the basis or use of others. As Wittgenstein says, in playing a language-game an individual might invent a new move, giving the language-game itself “a new joint” (Z, §425). We can use our practices critically, in order to reflect upon and seek to enact alternatives to other of our practices, all without repudiating basic agreement regarding our shared idioms of speaking and acting. The individualistic reading I have presented also repudiates Richard Rorty's interpretation of Wittgenstein and Oakeshott. Criticism is not mere irony or speaking nonsense (i.e., statements that are not candidates to be either true or false) to the community until through luck and repetition it becomes accepted as part of how “we” speak and act. Footnote ⁴⁶ Criticism is an integral, meaningful feature of linguistic community as such.

The individualistic view of language-games and agency signals, on the one hand, a robust understanding of the conditionality of our practices while at the same time recognizing the availability of meaningful criticism, and, on the other hand, a greater appreciation of the depth to which we must be invested in meaningful practices of criticism. Criticism in word and deed can get traction most anywhere, in respect of most any practice. Yet in order to gain genuine purchase on our concepts and practices, we must reorient our relationship to these practices. If criticism is to be more than nonsense at worst and idle talk or posturing at best, then we must change how we live our practices.Footnote ⁴⁷ At a superficial level this is an injunction against hypocrisy—if you would change practice x, you should change how you live in relation to it. Genuine contestation of, say, our practices of rights may circumstantially require that we not avail ourselves of the rights whose meaning we contest. (E.g., a critic who claims his or her own freedom of speech in order to argue against the same freedom for others displays both political naiveté and argumentative incompetence. Genuine criticism of such a freedom might call the critic's own standing as a speaker into question.) Yet at another level this is an observation about individual agency in relation to the social world. The individual is inexorably conditioned by the social world in and in respect of which she learns and uses the practices that shape her as an agent. Nonetheless, the actions of individual language users are the life of these practices. Just as the individual is conditioned by the practices she enacts, her enactments shape the practices themselves.

Perhaps one of Wittgenstein's most profound statements (i.e., so obvious that it cries out for the saying) regarding both language and agency is “if agreement were universal, we should be quite unacquainted with the concept of it” (Z, §430). This, one could say, is the seed from which the larger account of individual agency grows. Wittgenstein's and Oakeshott's accounts of language, practices, and agency, premised as they are upon agreement and the manifestations of agreement, hold open spaces for meaningful, unexaggerated critical agency. Though they draw the boundaries more conservatively than some, they better map the “rough ground” on which individual critical agency gets its traction (PI, §107).