I want to argue that a good way to understand the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein is to see him as a conservative thinker or, better, that a good way to read the Philosophical Investigations is to see it as a document embodying the conservative thought style². It is very important to understand what is meant by the word "conservative' here. I am going to take my definition of "conservative thought' from the essay of that title written by the sociologist Karl Mannheim. It is to be found in his Essays on Sociology and Social Psychology published in 1953.