Hanna Pitkin on Conceptual Puzzlement

Abstract

In rereading Hanna Pitkin’s Wittgenstein and Justice (W&J) fifty years after it was first published, I am awestruck by the author’s courage in pursuing what seemed important to her, regardless of the risks entailed in that project. Her courage has been rewarding for many of us for it has opened the possibility of introducing a Wittgensteinian sensibility into political theory, asking its practitioners to learn to see—not what was hidden, but what was right before their eyes. The provocation she offeredwas not that of asking for new answers to alreadywell-known questions, say, about the origin of the state, but to ask, what were the questions that reallymattered and to whom?At the same time, there is the imperceptible force of the conventional formulations thatmanage to find a place almost inadvertently in her text when Pitkin applies some of her insights to concepts of justice, or fairness, or, for that matter, to the very notion of the political. We see that Wittgenstein’s anguish over the likely failure of philosophy to “shew the fly a way out of the fly-bottle” is not easy to assuage. These issues continue to pose formidable problems for understanding academic and public discourse on contemporary politics. In this essay I propose to show the difficulty of the task Pitkin sets herself through an analysis of a limited region of her thought, viz., what she calls “conceptual puzzlement,”where she brings some of themost incisive insights fromWittgenstein to bear on political theory. However, before I go into the substantive issues, I want to signal how important is the form of Philosophical Investigations (herewith PI) for me; the fact that Wittgenstein conceives of PI as a kind of album; and that instead of a straightforward argument, the text leads us astray through the voice of temptation