Through an exploration of the apparently apolitical linguistic approach of Cavell, this paper examines what he calls the “politics of interpretation”. Cavell’s Wittgensteinian approach to scepticism and his account of Emersonian moral perfectionism help to demonstrate the need to meet the political crisis of democracy with language of a more subtly critical kind. It indicates a way out of the nihilism inherent in our democracies without abrogating our hope for words and thought, for how we relate to the language we use is part of our becoming political. Cavell’s philosophy is turned towards our existential need to recover political emotion, the mainspring of a desire to think that affirms humanity as necessarily political. The paper will examine Cavell’s idea of passionate language as a peculiar mode of performative language and explore its connection with Emerson and Thoreau, who, he claims, “underwrite” ordinary language philosophy. This offers a more hopeful response to the crisis of democracy and citizenship, touching despair but realizing within it the prophetic power of language. It will show this “political crisis” to be not something peculiar to our times but internal to the very nature of our (political) lives.