Skinner and Foucault: Genealogy and Historical Method

Acknowledgement of Supervision: Professor Richard Whatmore

Confused? Never fear, we are getting closer to a method. By the time of the next class, certain truths were becoming more crystalized. In this forum, we discussed the work of Quentin Skinner and Michel Foucault and their different approaches to conducting genealogies of the past.

Skinner:

Starting with Skinner’s work Genealogy of the Modern State, I took an interest in how he posed that there has never been a consistent or shared conceptualisation of the state. Skinner instead used genealogy to expose the contingent and contestable character of the concepts through which the state has been understood. This already struck me as something very new, as my prior understanding of genealogy was focused on looking at the ideological frameworks of the past that revealed power relations in history, through the work of Michel Foucault. Whereas, for Skinner the power relations are not as important, taking a very traditional meaning of the term ‘genealogy’ meaning to trace back to the origin of the emergence of an idea, concept or institution. This then is a way of uncovering the historical context in which concepts and institutions have been shaped and understanding how they have evolved over time.¹

Certain conceptualisations of what the ‘state’ means have come to predominate our understanding of the semantics of the term, but as Skinner wants to highlight, this has not always been so. At current, the prevailing comprehension of the term might be more closely related to the ‘apparatus of the state’. But, using genealogy, we can free ourselves from the set definitions and reimagine the ‘state’ and how we understand it. Skinner suggests that institutions/concepts that have strong normative contexts can undergo substantial semantic change. This implies that when a term has a subjective rather than objective meaning, over time the language evolves in a creative way rather than it signifying one consistent signified.²

This ‘drift’ can be seen through a couple of semantic examples. Firstly, at one-time state would have had the sole connotation of a realm or nation, meaning pure geography. This was then challenged by utilitarians who didn’t like abstract notions of ‘state’ so turned it into a practical piece of terminology to correspond directly with the process of ‘government’. Therefore, we can use the aforementioned Skinnerian iteration of genealogy to critique the utilitarian formulation… Does talking about the ‘state’ only mean talking about the government?

For Skinner, surely not. The ‘state’ must mean more than this, and therefore something more needs to be recovered. There are the populist views of the state – that there is some personality or characteristic of everything within the state. This is a very fictional account of the term, and resulted in more legalist accounts of ‘state’. This can be seen through Skinner’s vehicle of sovereign debt defining the state, as something which stays consistent whilst governments change. The ‘state’ is a union of ourselves, which is the Hobbesian ‘person’ of the state. Therefore, just as the debt belongs to us as the ‘state’, so too does the government which we can judge on the grounds of legitimacy, as to how it forms within the state (us).³

This then is Skinner’s way of illuminating the historical origins and development of concepts and institutions, regarding the oscillating context and meanings.

Foucault:

On the other hand, for Michel Foucault, ‘genealogy’ is a means of tracing the historical development of ideas and practices, revealing how they have been forged from power relations and social struggles. He uses the terminology to examine the emergence of various institutions and technologies of power (e.g. prisons, asylums, and the modern notion of madness). Foucault’s ‘genealogy’ is a critical and deconstructive method that challenges dominant interpretations of history and reveals how power is embedded in our social, political, and cultural practices – what he calls ‘ruins’ that transfer through time. As he writes in Nietzsche, Genealogy and History, his genealogical method “rejects the metahistorical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies” and thereby “Opposes itself to the search for “origins.”⁴

Moreover, for Foucault, knowledge is produced by power relations and he sees history as a site of power struggles. Bearing this in mind, the search for objective truth in history he sees as fundamentally flawed, and instead turns to re-writing history to debunk myths that have been created to maintain structures. He writes that when listening to (or reading) history, the genealogist finds “not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion”.This indicts traditional histories as being a facade, erected to maintain a status quo of the balance of power – a relation of domination and subordination. He slams the concept of ‘liberty’ as an “invention of the ruling classes”, directly citing Nietzsche.For Foucault, this was a concept developed during the Enlightenment which only served to transition the form of domination from a feudal system’s elite to modernity’s elite.⁵

Moreover, he makes a similar point to Popper’s that I mentioned in the last post. He poses that we rely too heavily on an assumption that there is a truth in history which is steadfast and watertight. Instead, we should accept the myth-building of history, and debunk these myths where we can since for Foucault history is “the history of an error we call truth”.What Foucault is pointing out is that any suggestion of ‘knowing’ something about history, is something that will get proved wrong by a new discovery in the ongoing exploration of history. Therefore, as we delve deeper and ‘excavate’ that which has been hidden by historian’s myths of the past, we allow these “elements to escape from a labyrinth where no truth had ever detained them.”⁶

This leads to Foucault’s quintessential takeaway and difference from Skinner… That ‘genealogy’ for him is not interested in “the anticipatory power of meaning, but the hazardous play of domination.”That is to say that Skinner’s obsession with contextualisation and uncovering meaning is irrelevant and antiquarian, instead Foucault champions an approach that seeks out where power has driven the development of ideas for the purpose of control, domination and subordination. Therefore, unlike Skinner, “Genealogy does not resemble the evolution of a species and does not map the destiny of a people”, but instead for Foucault it serves the purpose of being able to “identify the accidents, the minute deviations-or conversely, the complete reversals-the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty cal­culations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us”.This underscores Foucault’s approach, that history is not just a record of past events, but also a product of the present and a means of shaping the future – that by uncovering that which is hidden in traditional histories we can find the ‘ruins’ which pass through to our own times.⁷

In fact, as I come to a close, it is observable that there are some similarities in both scholars’ genealogical approaches. They both reject traditional, linear approaches to history that see it as a record of past events leading to a predetermined outcome and they both respectively emphasize the importance of understanding the cultural and political context in which historical events take place. Finally, one uniting factor is that Skinner and Foucault both approach history as a dynamic and ongoing process, Foucault focussing on its shaping by power relations and Skinner on cultural influences.

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Related Reading

Continue exploring related themes across The Intellectual Historian:

• Intellectual History: A Guide to Ideas in Context
• Writing Intellectual History: Context, Argument and the Problem of Myth
• Beginnings in Intellectual History: Context, Texts and Method
• Michel Foucault: Power, Knowledge and the Practice of History

Notes

1. Quentin Skinner, “A Genealogy of the Modern State,” Proceedings of the British Academy 162 (2009): 325–70, especially 325–27. ↩
2. Skinner, “Genealogy of the Modern State,” 325–27, 356–64. ↩
3. Skinner, “Genealogy of the Modern State,” 345–47, 363–64. ↩
4. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 140. ↩
5. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 142–43. ↩
6. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 143–46. ↩
7. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 146–48. ↩

Selected Bibliography

• Bevir, Mark. The Logic of the History of Ideas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
• Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.
• Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, edited by Donald F. Bouchard, translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, 139–64. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977.
• LaCapra, Dominick. Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983.
• Pocock, J. G. A. Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
• Skinner, Quentin. “A Genealogy of the Modern State.” Proceedings of the British Academy 162 (2009): 325–70.

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