Genealogy and Political Philosophy

Prinz, Janosch, and Paul Raekstad. 2020. "The value of genealogies for political philosophy." Inquiry 67, no. 7, 2084-2103.

Discussion Questions:

1. What are the differences between genealogy and ideology critique?

2. What's the difference between Williams's "imaginary" genealogy and ideal theory?

3. How does Geuss's method differ from Foucault's? (Causality: many -> one).

4. Do genealogy's presuppositions reproduce colonial reasoning? Is genealogy only possible within a Western/colonial ontology?

5. Is Geuss conducting a paradigm study? If so, how is this genealogy?

6. Can explanations provide justifications? When and where is normativity?

How do we understand "ideology?" Well, people have critiqued the Marxian theory of ideology because it already has normative content. For Marxists, ideology is not just a system of coherent views that induce certain kinds of conduct, but conduct that works against interest of the agent holding said ideology and serving the interests of a ruling stratum/class. Classical ideology critique also makes a claim to reality, which is distorted by ideological beliefs. Genealogy makes no claim to a reality it attempts to disambiguate in the classic sense. 

In many ways, ideology becomes an artifice which must be subjected to analysis. 

Ideal theory as ideology? Idealizations not only abstract important factors, but adds too much unrealistic capabilities (O'Neill and Mills). Williams isn't doing ideal theory in his imaginary genealogy because he's committed to philosophical naturalism. Rawls and Cohen are offering a "structural model." For the latter, they rely on "noumenal selves" which are stripped down to have a strict sense of justice at the expense of other motivations. 

What's the point of Williams's imaginary genealogy as far as its practical value? Williams wants to consider how and why people would come to value truth and truthfulness, regardless of what that concept of truth looks like.

Geuss is more concerned with tracking the contingency of concepts, but is he actually doing "genealogy"? Geuss wants us to see how political concepts actually play out in the real world. Rawls formulates political concepts without power, where Geuss and Foucault are always attentive to the relationship between political concepts and power. 

Why do we need to show the historical development of concepts/practices? What does the "development" do in uprooting the necessity of such concepts/practices. Development could mean simply succession of events, or things "evolving" in a unitary trajectory. 

"Cartesian coordinate metaphor." Geuss seems to see how concepts (e.g., public/private) have appeared and been invoked throughout Western history.

Geuss seems to be an "idealist," because he's concerned with concepts, and not necessarily how they're tied to practices. Does Geuss begin from a problem or from a certainty? Geuss's method seems to be deflationary, because he's trying to displace the importance of established political concepts. Geuss doesn't have a methodologically specified "genealogy." He's more doing a history of ideas. 

Amy Allen's decolonial/postcolonial critique of critical theory. Does genealogy recapitulate colonial epistemologies? Doesn't that presuppose that concepts/ideas were motives for colonization?

Can we do genealogy critically? Particularly in the context of racial and gendered domination?