Acknowledging Hanna Pitkin: A Belated Discovery of a Kindred Spirit

Abstract

I had never heard of either Hanna Pitkin orWittgenstein and Justice until Linda Zerilli mentioned the book to me some time in the mid-2010s. Or so I thought. But then I noticed that Stanley Cavell singles the book out in the preface to his masterpiece The Claim of Reason, which I have been reading and rereading for years. There is no way I could have missed the reference every time I looked at that preface. Why didn’t I immediately rush out to read Pitkin’s book? If not in the 1990s, when I was first immersing myself in Wittgenstein and Cavell, then at least in the early 2010s when I was beginning to write Revolution of the Ordinary? I still have no answer. In one way, my failure to pick up Pitkin’s book is not surprising: I am a literary critic, not a political theorist. In another way, it’s astonishing that I somehowmanaged to avoid Wittgenstein and Justice (W&J) entirely for so many years. For now that I finally have read the book, I realize that fifty years ago Pitkin embarked on exactly the same kind of project that I took up in Revolution of the Ordinary. Her subtitle isOn the Significance of LudwigWittgenstein for Social and Political Thought. My subtitle isLiterary Studies afterWittgenstein, Austin, andCavell. Pitkin sets out to show other political theorists that ordinary language philosophy, which she understands as Wittgenstein’s late philosophy as analyzed and developed by Stanley Cavell, could have a transformative effect on her own discipline. In the same way, I begin Revolution of the Ordinary by declaring that ordinary language philosophy,