Marx and Wittgenstein

Karl Marx is rightly regarded as one of the most important philosophers of the nineteenth century. His work encouraged the growth of socialist and communist parties and inspired revolutions in the twentieth century. Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto has sold more copies than 50 Shades of Grey. In fact, the only book to have sold more copies is the Bible. With capitalism having recently been in a deep economic crisis around the world, trust in mainstream economists is dwindling and a new generation is turning to Marx for answers. David Harvey's lectures on Marx's Capital are being viewed by hundreds of thousands of people via the internet and sales of the book itself are up. Since Syriza's victory in the Greek election of January 2015 the ‘erratic Marxist’, and finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, has become a regular feature on the news. Historians, political theorists, and philosophers who are opposed to Marx's thought cannot afford to ignore it.

Similarly, Wittgenstein is regarded by many as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century. Bertrand Russell, writing in 1959, said that ‘during the period since 1914 three philosophies have successively dominated the British philosophical world, first that of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, second that of the Logical Positivists, and third that of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations’. Peter Hacker, commenting on this assessment, suggests that ‘Wittgenstein bestrides fifty years of twentieth century analytic philosophy somewhat as Picasso bestrides fifty years of twentieth century painting’. His work has influenced the course of psychology, sociology, and cultural theory as well as philosophy and it has inspired poetry, novels, and films.

However, given the enormous influence of these two thinkers it is surprising that little has been written about the commonalities in their thought or about the possibility that the two philosophies might be mutually enriching.6 It is not that commonalities do not exist. Gavin Kitching, in his introduction to a collection of essays about Marx and Wittgenstein, claims that both Wittgenstein and Marx reject the idea that language ‘pictures’ reality, oppose the idea that in studying society we study something essentially non- linguistic, and reject the dualisms of observer- observed and subject- object. Others have pointed out that Marx and Wittgenstein both evoke natural history, that they both think that philosophers need to entirely reconceive their task, and that both philosophers are particularly sensitive to social context.