Problematizing Societal Practice: Histories of the Present and Their Genealogies

Abstract

The chapter discusses a mode of critical historical work often referred to as the writing of the “history of the present.” In the broadest terms, scholars who contribute to this genre place the study of the past in the service of a critical engagement with the present while committed to a radical historicism. To examine the epistemological and ethical-political commitments of this approach, the chapter, first, distinguishes different forms of critique. Genealogical critique in the tradition of Nietzsche and Foucault, on which this critical historical practice heavily draws, represents a variant of critique that does not set out to reject what it critiques but to render it problematic and contestable. Second, the chapter highlights two strands of recent scholarship written in this mode. On the one hand, authors have employed genealogy to study the fractured, nonlinear histories of scientific ideas and thought traditions in the human sciences, whereas another group of scholars has been more committed to Foucault’s praxeological perspective and the analysis of power relations. Building on these examples and a discussion of the late Foucault’s understanding of critique, the chapter, finally, aims to explicate both the broader theoretical and ethical-political stakes that animate this critical use of history.