By Nigel Pleasants
This publication makes use of the philosophy of Wittgenstein as a viewpoint from which to problem the belief of a serious social idea, represented pre-eminently through Giddens, Habernas and Bhaskar.
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Additional resources for Wittgenstein and the Idea of a Critical Social Theory: A Critique of Giddens, Habermas and Bhaskar (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)
Example text
O’Neill notes that Wittgenstein’s critique of the ‘craving for generality’ is often invoked by post-modernist critics of essentialism. However, this is mistaken according to O’Neill, because although Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘family resemblances’ rightly rejects ‘naive’ essentialism, it is fully compatible with ‘sophisticated’ essentialism. : 272) explains that ‘those similarities are real—there does exist a network of properties that thread together entities that fall under a term’. The point that O’Neill wants to make is that if it is the case that the instantiations of a certain term have in common only a set of ‘family resemblances’, then the essence of the phenomenon named by that term is the sum of all those similarities as a whole.
268). If these ‘post-Marxist’ critics are right about this, then both defenders and critics of ‘the market’ are radically confused in the claims they make. The first part of O’Neill’s defence consists in arguing that criticisms of essentialism as such are based on an inaccurate ‘straw person’ conception of essentialism to which no serious essentialist actually subscribes. O’Neill notes that Wittgenstein’s critique of the ‘craving for generality’ is often invoked by post-modernist critics of essentialism.
4 However, critical social theorists (Habermas [1967] 1988; Giddens 1976; Bhaskar [1979] 1989a) were more sympathetic, and instigated a positive response to Winch’s proposals. Whilst they agreed with Winch’s critics on the importance of critical standards of evaluation and the explanatory power of natural and social science, critical social theorists saw value in most, if not all, of Winch’s anti-positivist criticisms. And they welcomed the basic outline of his theory of social ontology, which they incorporated into their own theoretical programmes.