Wittgenstein did not address the question of history directly or extensively. But his vision of language is pervasively historical and has implications for the way we do literary history. This chapter examines the idea of use at the heart of Wittgenstein’s vision of language, especially how it differs from the question of context, and how it is related to “forms of life.” After exemplifying these concepts in Wittgenstein by revisiting some of the early remarks in the Philosophical Investigations, I explore the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) to show how the teaching of the differences in the use of words is at the heart of its practice. Finally, I highlight the work of an exemplary critic, William Empson, who regarded his work as an important corrective to the OED, and whose work is highly attuned to the history of use. The implications of Wittgenstein’s vision of language with its fundamental revision of linguistic agency show that much contemporary historical criticism is not historical enough.

Using a historical institutionalist approach, I demonstrate how institutionalized norms stemming from the liberal tradition in America have informed its language regime by tracing the path dependency of language policy and the critical junctures when changing norms lead to policy shifts. In the early republic, liberal norms enshrined in the Constitution informed a minimalist language regime. At the turn of the 19th century, norms shifted to reflect rapid industrialization and mass immigration, informing attempts at restrictive language policies. At the critical juncture of the civil rights movement, the monolingual language regime was challenged by new norms of what constituted a liberal democratic society. Neoliberal norms of the Reagan presidency facilitated the success of the English-only movement in changing language policies at the state-level. Neoliberal cosmopolitanism of the new millennium re-introduced minimal multilingual policy initiatives. I conclude by suggesting that Trump’s election represents a shift to nationalist, albeit possibly illiberal, norms.

The political theorizing of language is unavoidably reliant on at least certain basic assumptions concerning the nature of language and linguistic agency. In multilingual and multicultural societies such as Canada, the task of identifying, articulating, and ultimately evaluating such assumptions is more complex, given their more heterogeneous linguistic landscape, and the (sometimes conflicting) clusters of beliefs, attitudes, anxieties, hopes, and expectations attached by speakers to particular languages as well as to the broader repertoire. The chapter focuses its attention on the debate over multiculturalism/interculturalism in the Canadian context. It explores and defends the argument that this debate can be seen in fact as a debate between two distinct conceptions of language and linguistic agency, namely the designative (“Lockean”, i.e., language as detached from a partial and intersubjective human experience) and the constitutive (“Herderian”, i.e., language as inextricably linked to a contextualized social epistemology), respectively. The distinctive logic and reasoning of both models, the chapter argues, can only be defended by embracing a non-holistic “in-betweenness” experience (and conception) of language as an underlying constitutive commonality.