My work is aimed at providing a historically-grounded diagnosis of our time. It focuses on principles of thought and action that have governed the European and American worlds since early modern times, but are now giving way under the impact of changes that are both obvious and poorly understood. Understanding those changes requires a perspective on European history as a whole, beginning with its medieval phase and leading all the way across the modern age to globalization and postmodernism. Such a perspective requires a systematic challenge to the taboo on anachronism, the restriction of meaning to the context of a particular time and place, and other dogmas of historicism. The most abundant source of support for such a challenge I have found consists of a reading of Wittgenstein’s PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS quite different from readings most likely to be familiar to historians.