Malinowski was right in politics: was he also right on language? Wittgenstein's later views on language and society are intimately blended and virtually identical. In fact Wittgenstein's theory of language, central to his philosophy, is but a coded theory of society: mankind lives in cultural communities or, in his words, ‘forms of life’, which are self-sustaining, self-legitimating, logically and normatively final. They can only be described, they cannot be justified or explained, for they constitute the terminal, ultimate point of any explication or validation. From time to time, men are tempted into seeking extra-cultural or transcultural grounds for their conceptual custom: this is the error in philosophy, the mistake which in fact engenders all (past, misguided) philosophy. Sound philosophy consists of curing men of the temptation to indulge in this mistake, and in leading them back to accepting their cultural/linguistic custom, so that sound philosophy does indeed ‘leave everything as it is’. To put all this in an idiom he never used, because he never attended to socio-political issues (he was politically colour-blind and tone deaf): the nationalist-populists are right, the individualist-universalist liberals are wrong and exhibit the pathological condition of thought. In fact, of course, Wittgenstein had unwittingly imbibed this vision from the populists (many of whom were due to become fascists), for it totally pervaded the Viennese atmosphere.