ABSTRACT
Lyotard’s brand of post-rationalism derives from a very reduced sense of Wittgenstein’s concept of a language game as an injunction to ‘just gaming’. In this way, he is able to scandalize Habermas’s construction of an ideal speech community by apparently undermining its grounds in speech-act theory and separating it from its links to tradition and history-and thus from any metalanguage of universal reason and freedom. Lyotard’s arguments in fact increase the terrorism they attribute to Habermas’s bias to consensus because they neglect the double struggle to achieve ethical individuality and social reciprocity. To gain perspective with respect to this debate, I think it is valuable to look at Winch’s development of the Wittgensteinian concept of language and its implications for social science hermeneutics, especially since these arguments are reasonably clear and can be given a radical turn, without embracing Lyotardian violence. Further features of the argument will be taken up in the following chapter where we consider Giddens’s restrictions on common-sense social science and their limitation of civic democracy.
