No doubt you can't properly understand Wittgenstein or the positivists without understand Vienna, any more than you can understand Marx without understanding German classical philosophy. My point si just that they took advantage of the freedoms of liberal demiocracy to develop their ideas. Btw you also can't understand Marx without understanding British political economy (as well as French socialism), and you can't understand Wittgenstein
without understanding his relation to British analytical philosophy, or the positivists without their relation to British empiricism. --------- I write:
Agreed. But just to be a stickler: Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus in the trenches in the front lines of WWI and then in a POW camp. Not the most liberal or democratic of surroundings. :)
BTW did Ludwig have any political convictions of his own? He doesn't strike me as a democrat. I know he volunteered to work as a manual laborer in the USSR.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal