ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the main themes in Wittgensteinian philosophical semantics, underscoring certain concepts and using these to construct the theory that semantic necessity is moral necessity. It argues that the preservation of a particular set of normative regularities is as essential to the very possibility of language as is the existence of regularity in nature. The chapter considers the conceptual background which influenced the direction Karl Marx’s enquiries ultimately took, traces the development of his theory of history to its mature expression in the Preface of 1859 and in Capital, and proceeds to an account of its salient features. The myth of the ‘two Wittgensteins’ parallels, to some extent, the story of the schism between the young and the mature Marx. It is not enough to say of Marx, what was true of Wittgenstein, that continuities co-exist with disjunctures within the full corpus of his texts.
