Method
Genealogy
Classification
- Method family
- critical / interpretive
- Domains
- Political Philosophy
Overview
Genealogy reconstructs how values, concepts, identities, or practices emerged through contingent struggles, institutions, and relations of power.
Purpose. The method makes apparently natural or necessary arrangements available for criticism by showing how they were produced. Genealogy is not a neutral chronology and does not assume that history unfolds toward a fixed end.
Characteristic operations
- Select a present practice: Begin with a value, institution, identity, or category that now appears settled.
- Reject a single pure origin: Look for heterogeneous beginnings, accidents, conflicts, and reversals.
- Trace embodied practices: Examine the institutions, disciplines, and techniques through which the object took shape.
- Diagnose present stakes: Show how that history still organizes what can be thought, done, or contested.
Used by traditions
Applied to questions
References
- Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, Preface and First Essay
- Michel Foucault, 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History' (1971)
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Michel Foucault, §3.2