[lbo-talk] Overrated writers

[Dissenting Wren]

Wittgenstein was politically all over the map.  He tried for awhile to emigrate to the Soviet Union, but he wanted to work there as a manual laborer, whilst the Bolsheviks were interested in having him there as a university professor (a post with which he sat oddly most of his life).  In the 1930s he arranged for most of the Wittgenstein family fortune (very substantial - they were the Habsburg steel magnates) to be turned over to the Nazis so that the Wittgensteins themselves would not be classed as Jews.  During WWII he was ardently pro-British, insisting on doing work as a porter in a hospital as his part toward the war effort.  Add to this his frequent withdrawals from human society altogether (to Norway, to Ireland), and you get the picture of someone whose social insertion into the world is far too complicated to have a political label affixed to it.  If you have to choose one, "conservative" would be harder to make stick than most.

----- Original Message -----
From: "123hop at comcast.net" <123hop at comcast.net>
To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
Cc: 
Sent: Sunday, April 24, 2011 9:37 PM
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Overrated writers

What was Wittgenstein's political inclination...? I mean, he did give all his money away....but to his sisters, for fear it would corrupt the poor?

J.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "// ravi" <ravi at platosbeard.org> 
To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org 
Sent: Sunday, April 24, 2011 6:48:53 PM 
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Overrated writers 

On Apr 24, 2011, at 12:27 PM, Bhaskar Sunkara wrote: 
> This Eagleton piece in Harper's on Naipaul is worth reading too: 
> http://jacobinmag.com/eagletonnaipaul.pdf 
> 
> some great lines. 
> 

Indeed. Thank you for the link. But I was surprised to read Wittgenstein and Popper described as [political] conservatives. 

—ravi 

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