Genealogy (philosophy)

In philosophy, genealogy is a historical technique in which one questions the commonly understood emergence of various philosophical and social beliefs by attempting to account for the scope, breadth or totality of Discourse extending the possibility of analysis as opposed to the Marxist use of the term Ideology to explain the totality of historical discourse within the time period in question, as opposed to focusing on a singular or dominant discourse (ideology). Moreover, a genealogy often attempts to look beyond the discourse in question, for the conditions of their possibility (particularly in Foucault's genealogies). It has been developed as a continuation of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nietzsche criticized "the genealogists" in On the Genealogy of Morals and proposed the use of a historic philosophy in order to critique modern morality by supposing that it developed into its current form through power relations. But scholars note that he emphasizes that rather than being purely necessary developments of power relations, these developments are to be exposed as at least partially contingent, and the upshot is that the present conception of morality could always have been constituted otherwise. Even though the philosophy of Nietzsche has been characterized as genealogy, he only uses the term in On the Genealogy of Morals, the later philosophy that has been influenced by Nietzsche and which is commonly described as genealogy shares several fundamental aspects of the insights of Nietzsche. Nietzschean historic philosophy has been described as "a consideration of oppositional tactics" that embraces instead of foreclosing the conflict between philosophical and historical accounts.

In the late twentieth century, Michel Foucault expanded the concept of genealogy into a counter-history of the position of the subject which traces the development of people and societies through history. His genealogy of the subject accounts "for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects, and so on, without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history."

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