>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. :)
Obviously I am not saying that one cannot do good or great philosophy in illiberal surroundings. Examples could be multipled: Gramsci in a fascist prison, Sartre in occupied France, Lukacs in Stalin's Moscow and Bakhtin, not in Moscow, etc. But these are not the most favorable venues for philosophy.
>
>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.
>
According to Ray Monk, his biographer, he was attracted to Communism in a theoretical way. Recall that he thanked Sraffa in his acknowledgenents to the Investigations, and Sraffa, whatever his implicit doubts about the LTV, was a pretty hardcore Stalinist. (I have this from friends who were studying with him him when I was a grad student at Cambridge.) Sraffa was probably one of the people recruited young Cambs grads to the Soviet cause in the 30s. I don't think W was ever political, he probably found the asceticism of the Communist ideal attractive.
jks
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