> Indeed. Thank you for the link. But I was surprised to read Wittgenstein and Popper described as [political] conservatives.
There's no doubt about Popper, but Wittgenstein is a more complicated case. He was for at least a while a sympathiser with the USSR. But Eagleton argues in a 1982 NLR essay ('Wittgenstein's Friends') that he was attracted to communism in its most repressive period for basically conservative reasons, a glorification of manual work and personal asceticism.
I can't let Popper and Wittgenstein go past in the same sentence without linking to this, about their famous hot-poker encounter in King's College. A great lecturer I once had used to love to tell this story. Best line goes to Bertrand Russell: "The trouble with you, Wittgenstein, is that you always get things wrong".
http://www.philosophos.com/philosophy_article_11.html
Mike Beggs