The Nature of Political Theory

142 The Nature of Political Theory

not provideanyclear or unambiguous universal foundations. Words do not refer
to elementary objects in the world. Conversely, meaning is resident in linguistic
conventions. Propositions about the world therefore must be grasped in the con-
text of language games, linguistic contexts, social practices, social conventions or
forms of life. Each of these variegated contexts embodies a series of particular rules
governing the range of uses of concepts. Concepts become meaningful within these
rule-governed settings. There is, therefore, no unmediated reality outside of language.
Nothing is independent of linguistic convention. The conventions in Wittgenstein also
remain somewhat hermetic and deterministic in their effect. Overall, this entails, as
discussed in Part Two, a rejection of all conceptual essentialism—thus the derivation
of the term ‘essential contestability’. Metaphysics and thick foundationalism charac-
teristically, for Wittgenstein, ignore the multi-dimensional character of language and
try to focus on the essences of key concepts. This leads in turn, to claims about the
objectivity of certain readings of concepts. For Wittgenstein, this latter approach is
philosophically flawed.
To emphasize linguistic context is not necessarily to collapse, as some critics argue,
into an unstructured relativism. Social conventions overlap and often have com-
plex family resemblance. Further, a language game can embody a whole way of life
and thought. In one sense, the language game or convention can also become a
micro-foundation—although Wittgenstein would more than likely reject the whole
vocabulary of foundationalism. To become a Buddhist, for example, is to root one’s
life and thought in a body of linked rules or conventions. These rules or con-
ventions provide a contextual foundation for a whole way of life—which is by no
means arbitrary—although it is still relative to the social practice of Buddhism. But
Buddhism, in itself, is not, from this perspective, a universal foundation independent
of language, which can be used for rational deductions. It is rather acommitment
to a particular form of life, which then forms a basis of reasoning. The overlaps,
resemblances, and complex relations between concepts, used in different language
games, inevitably make ‘fixing’ the meaning and boundaries of concepts that much
more difficult.
In this context, when applied to political theory, concepts can only be elucidated
within the forms of life within which they occur. We should not therefore think
that some essential meaning can be identified outside of socio-linguistic contexts.
Reason, meaning, and action are, in this theory, always internal to practices and
forms of life. There is no outside or independent body of values, interests, or reasons,
which can assess the practices in which humans engage. A meaningful concept pre-
supposes a form of life. Thus, the human self is embedded and identified within a
complexity of practices. The nature of the human beings is only revealed in this multi-
faceted context. Consequently there is, for example, no one overarching account of
human nature or the human self. Human nature is inevitably diversified and read
differently across differing forms of life. Human nature would thus be essentially
contestable. Alternatively one might argue that humans, as such, have no nature what-
soever, there areonlyconventions. This latter position would be the more extreme
reading.