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, thus extending the possibility of analysis. Moreover, a genealogy often attempts to look beyond the discourse in question toward the conditions of their possibility (particularly in Michel Foucault's genealogies). It has been developed as a continuation of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Genealogy is opposed to the Marxist use of the ideology to explain the totality of historical discourse within the time period in question by focusing on a singular or dominant discourse (ideology).

For example, tracking the lineages of a concept such as 'globalization' can be called a 'genealogy' to the extent that the concept is located in its changing constitutive setting.^[1] This entails not just documenting its changing meaning (etymology) but the social basis of its changing meaning.