Historicism and Critique

1. Historicism

Historicism is the idea that human life can be understood only historically. The word historicism appeared in English in the early twentieth century as a translation of the Italian storicisimo, as used by Benedetto Croce, or the German historismus, as used by Friedrich Meinecke and Ernst Troeltsch (Rand 1964). ¹ These European thinkers had openly debated a crisis of historicism, but the phrase “crisis of historicism” misleads. The debate covered worries about the philosophical and social consequences of too strong an emphasis on the historical nature of human life, but the worries affected people who believed in historical approaches. It is more accurate, therefore, to talk of a crisis in historicism. Historically minded thinkers worried that their historical worldview undercut itself, leading to destructive relativism in epistemology and ethics.

The nineteenth century saw the rise and growing dominance of organicism, romanticism, and historicist styles of reasoning. Philosophers believed that human life, and perhaps also the natural world, expressed a creative and purposeful intentionality that unfolded over time. Auguste Comte, G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and Herbert Spencer all argued that human societies could be understood properly only as products of historical processes. Many of the developmental historicists of the nineteenth century appealed to principles that allegedly guided history. Different philosophers used different principles but the most common ones included liberty, reason, nation, and statehood. These principles gave a progressive direction to the idea of history. By the early twentieth century, however, philosophers were grappling with ways in which this developmental historicism undermined its own accounts of knowledge and subjectivity (Everdell 1997). Before long, the First World War posed further dilemmas for developmental historicism, undermining people’s faith in reason and progress.

Croce, Meinecke, and Troeltsch showed little sympathy for formal explanations. Sometimes, they complained that formal explanations failed to properly allow for the role of intentionality, context, and change in human life. However, these historicists were also skeptical of the developmental perspectives that had dominated the nineteenth century. In their view, developmental historicists tamed context and change by postulating key principles as guiding progress. The developmental historicists elided contingency by locating choices in narratives of progress and rationality. Developmental historicists hid their retroactive construction of the stability of their narratives. So, in the early twentieth century, historicists began tentatively to explore historicizations of the very principles that had given stability and continuity to developmental narratives. The crisis of historicism came from this radical historicism with its suspicion of developmental narratives. When historicists queried principles of continuity, they raised a skeptical challenge to the possibility of objective historical knowledge. They drew attention to the ubiquity of change. They suggested that the past might have little in common with the present. They raised concerns about the distorting effects of present concepts and interests on accounts of the past.

A rejection of the developmental tropes of the nineteenth century can lead to what I will call “radical historicism.” The point is not that Croce, Meinecke, and Troeltsch subscribed to this radical historicism; they did not. The point is that historicism leans toward this radical form once one applies it to its roots so as to historicize the principles that were used to guide earlier developmental histories. As historicists reject the nineteenth-century tropes of continuity, reason, and progress, so they emphasize nominalism, contestability, and contingency.

Historicists conceive of human life as unfolding against a historical background. Actions, practices, and institutions come into being in historical contexts that influence their content. Developmental historicists evoked more or less fixed principles to give unity to these historical entities and their progress. States, for example, were defined by traditions consisting of national characteristics or by a general pathway to civilization. In contrast, radical historicists lean toward nominalist views of actions, practices, and also the traditions informing them. As Michel Foucault argued, “anthropological universals” appear as historical constructs with no fixed content.

Radical historicists eschew analyses of aggregate concepts in the social sciences—such as state, society, economy, nation, and class—that point to an essence (including principles) that defines the boundaries or development of the relevant entities. As a result, radical historicism sometimes may seem opposed to all aggregate concepts and explanations. However, radical historicists can deploy aggregate concepts—including “developmental historicism,” “Christian morality,” and “disciplinary power”—provided they treat these concepts pragmatically in relation to what is being explained. Here, a radical historicist explanation of actions and practices appeals to the historical background or tradition that informs them, where the relevant tradition is defined not by an essence or fixed principles but as the particular slice of the past that best explains the relevant actions and practices.

Clearly radical historicists cannot explain change in actions, practices, and traditions by appealing to fixed principles or essences. They reject the teleological narratives of developmental historicism, including those that are widely associated with Marxist critical theory. Radical historicists therefore portray history as discontinuous and contingent. History is a series of contingent, accidental appropriations, modifications, and transformations from the old to the new. As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, there is “no more important proposition” for historians than that:

The origin of the emergence of a thing and its ultimate usefulness, its practical application and incorporation into a system of ends, are toto coelo separate; that anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose by a power superior to it; that everything that occurs in the organic world consists of overpowering, dominating, and in their turn, overpowering and dominating consist of re-interpretation, adjustment, in the process of which their former “meaning” and “purpose” must necessarily be obscured or completely obliterated. (Nietzsche 2007, 51)

This stress on contingency may appear to suggest that change is inexplicable. However, radical historicists often describe and explain change; they just do so without appealing to overarching principles. Change occurs contingently as, for example, people reinterpret, modify, or transform an inherited tradition in response to novel circumstances or other dilemmas.

An emphasis on contingency implies that history is radically open in that what happens is always contestable. It suggests that there are always innumerable ways in which a thing—an action, practice, or tradition—may be reinterpreted, transformed, or overpowered. Thus, radical historicists are suspicious of attempts to portray a thing as unified and its transformation as peaceful. They highlight the diverse meanings that accompany any practice and the contests that accompany all attempts to transform practices. In doing so, radical historicists often adopt a decentered approach, where to decenter is to show how apparently uniform concepts, traditions, or practices are in fact social constructs that cover and arise from individuals acting on diverse and changing meanings. Similarly, radical historicists often deploy a concept of power to highlight the diversity and contests that lie behind illusions of unity and necessity. When they do so, however, they rarely intend to point to a power-center. ² They do not use the term power to suggest that one group, with a set of interests defined by its own social position, dominates or exploits some other group. They use power simply to signal the presence of multiplicity and struggle.

Before turning to the relationship of this radical historicism to critique, it is worth pausing to show how it can avoid pernicious relativism. Radical historicists need here to address a question posed forcefully during the crisis of historicism: does historicism undercut itself? Radical historicism certainly opposes truth claims that do not recognize their own historicity, including those masquerading as certainties based on pure reason or pure experience. From a historicist perspective, all truth claims are necessarily saturated by the traditions against the background of which they are made. Nonetheless, a rejection of utter certainties does not entail rejection of all claims to objectivity. Radical historicists can make truth claims provided they think of “truth” not as certainty but as “objectively valid for us” or “the best account of the world currently on offer.” A historicist concept of objectivity might require a convincing analysis of how we can evaluate rival accounts of the world without appealing to pure experience and pure reason, but it does not require suspension of all epistemic commitments.

This historicist approach to objectivity not only avoids relativism; it also suggests that histories can play an important role in epistemic decisions. When people compare rival theories, there is a danger that they will tacitly assume the superiority of a particular perspective. Typically, if people disagree about the relative merits of theories, they can pull back from the disagreement to find shared beliefs about facts, evidence, and reasoning by which to compare those theories. However, shared beliefs can be elusive especially when people are comparing whole approaches embodying different accounts of valid reasoning and justified evidence. In these cases, the comparisons between rival approaches in the social sciences can focus on the relative ability of each to account for itself and its competitors. Because the social sciences concern human life and because the social sciences are themselves part of human life, a theory of the social sciences should account for the social sciences themselves including itself and its rivals.

Any theory of human knowledge and subjectivity should be able to show it applies to the social sciences. When people apply theories such as postmodernism and historicism to the social sciences, they use the theory to explain the rise, development, and character of the theory and its rivals. Thus, to apply these theories to the social sciences is to make them engage one another. Each theory has to provide an account of the content and fate of the others. The history of the social sciences thus acts as a shared domain where rival theories meet one another. In this domain, a theory is comparatively successful if it provides a more satisfying account of the rise, content, and problems of others than can those others themselves. Thus, when historicists self-reflexively locate their beliefs in particular traditions, their self-reflexivity does not undercut their beliefs so much as contribute to an attempt to show that their historicism is the best theory of the social sciences currently on offer. Of course, others may disagree with this claim, but such disagreement is inevitable, and, crucially, to disagree with radical historicism is not necessarily to imply that radical historicism is incoherent or perniciously relativist.

2. Genealogy

Having sketched the content of a radical historicism, I can examine the support it lends to various types of critique—genealogy, historical ontology, and even ideology critique. To be clear, the point is not that radical historicism provides independent, noncircular grounds for critique; it is that radical historicism can elucidate key features of critique. Equally, the point is not that critical theorists are consciously committed to this radical historicism; it is that radical historicism provides a coherent philosophical theory of key features of their practice. Perhaps some critical theorists will doubt the wisdom of seeking any such philosophical theory. They may dismiss philosophical questions about the nature of critique and the commitments it entails. They may describe genealogy as an inherently critical style of inquiry that avoids all substantive commitments of its own. Unfortunately, these critical theorists enable their critics to avoid particular genealogies and even deny the coherence of a genealogical stance. Some critics sidestep particular genealogies by allowing that their beliefs and practices have contingent and unsavory origins but adding that these origins do not make their beliefs and practices any less reasonable. Other critics reject the genealogical stance as incoherent because it demands substantive commitments of a kind it precludes. To reply, critical theorists must go beyond pious but empty invocations of genealogy as inherently critical. They must provide a coherent philosophical theory of genealogy.

A robust theory of genealogy should meet several criteria. For a start, it should explain how and when genealogies act as critiques. In addition, it should provide an account of the epistemic commitments of genealogy, and these commitments should avoid presenting genealogy as a totalizing critique that undercuts itself. Finally, it should cover the main genealogies of Nietzsche and Foucault, ideally helping us to distinguish their genealogies from their other writings.

To conceive of genealogy as an expression of radical historicism is to clarify genealogy’s role as denaturalizing critique. Radical historicism includes a nominalist social ontology that emphasizes the contingency and contestability of beliefs, actions, and practices. It denaturalizes those beliefs, actions, and practices that people think are in some way natural. When people believe that certain social norms or ways of life are natural or inevitable, radical historicists can denaturalize these norms and ways of life by showing how they arose in contingent historical contests. Genealogy works as a form of critique because it applies the denaturalizing tendency of radical historicism to unsettle those who ascribe a false naturalness to their particular beliefs and actions. Genealogy reveals the contingency and contestability of ideas and practices that hide their origins.

Genealogy is not radical historicism but rather radical historicism in its critical guise. To identify genealogy with radical historicism would be to imply that genealogies need not be critical. Radical historicists can tell all kinds of narratives, some of which may involve a form of critical unmasking, but others of which may help us better to understand and vindicate aspects of ourselves. Although we could distinguish between critical and vindicatory genealogies, it is easier to use “radical historicism” as an umbrella term covering both critical and vindicatory narratives, restricting “genealogy” to radical historicism in its critical guise. ³

Genealogy is a radical historicist form of critique distinct from other types of critique. Genealogy differs from Kantian critique simply in being historicist. Kantian critique purportedly uses pure reason to discover universal truths, formal structures, and necessary limits. Genealogy uses empirical evidence to provide historical narratives of the contingent transformations of particular beliefs, traditions, and practices. The historicism of genealogy also distinguishes it from deconstruction. Deconstruction reveals instabilities and différance conceived as quasi-metaphysical and even necessary properties of all signification. Genealogy traces contests and diversity among the specific beliefs and actions of historical individuals. In addition, genealogy differs from dialectical critique in the radical nature of its historicism. The dialectic is developmental in that it implies internal contradictions drive a logical or historical movement toward resolution or synthesis. Genealogy rejects a developmental view, highlighting the contingency of historical movement and the absence of synthesis. The radical nature of this historicism also distinguishes genealogy from critical theory. Critical theorists believe that an end to ideology and power will allow people to act on their real interests and create a free society. They narrate a progressive or regressive teleology depending on their optimism or pessimism over the waxing or waning of ideology and power.

Let me turn now to the epistemic commitments and coherence of the genealogical stance. The analysis of genealogy as a form of radical historicism explains why worries about its totalizing nature echo worries that historicism leads to pernicious relativism. Sometimes genealogy’s overlap with historicism is mistaken, even by its advocates, for skepticism, relativism, or a suspension of epistemic commitments. However, a moment’s thought dispels the idea that genealogy can avoid truth claims. Genealogists make claims about the truth of the factual parts of their histories and the philosophical ideas embedded in the genealogical stance itself. If genealogy tried to avoid all substantive commitments, it would collapse into a totalizing critique that would undermine itself. If genealogists rejected the possibility of valid reasoning and objective knowledge, they would leave themselves no epistemic grounds on which to defend their specific genealogies or the genealogical stance. Genealogists should clarify the truths and concepts of truth they oppose and the truths and concepts of truth on which they rely.

Radical historicism explains how genealogists can challenge truth claims without rejecting all truth claims. On the one hand, genealogists continually question. They expose the particularity of perspectives that present themselves as universal and timeless truths. Indeed, their questioning can extend to their own perspective. They may wonder if their narratives and the genealogical stance are themselves just particular perspectives. On the other hand, to question beliefs is not necessarily to reject them. To expose the particularity of a perspective is not necessarily to deny its truth. Genealogical critiques deny the truth of a perspective only if that perspective is incompatible with recognition of its own particularity. Genealogists may question their own narratives and even accept that the genealogical stance is a particular one that arose historically without thereby rejecting their narratives or the genealogical stance. Indeed, genealogists can defend their truth claims and avoid undercutting themselves in the way I proposed radical historicists do: they can define objectively valid knowledge as the product of a comparison among rival theories.

The epistemic commitments associated with radical historicism clarify several other features of genealogy. For a start, they reinforce my earlier analysis of the critical nature of genealogy. As radical historicists reject truth as certainty, they denaturalize purportedly transcendent and universal perspectives that elide their own dependence on particular traditions. Equally, as radical historicists are not antirealists, their critiques depend on meticulous historical research. Genealogists try to trace the real histories and effects of beliefs, actions, and practices. In addition, the epistemic commitments of radical historicism help explain the philosophical style of many genealogies. As radical historicists are suspicious of utter certainties, they sometimes abandon standard claims to objectivity. They invent provocative aggregate concepts. Sometimes, they describe their narratives as speculative. Nonetheless, radical historicists still want to tell compelling narratives supported by evidence from empirical research that is, in Foucault’s (1984, 76) words, “gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary.”

Let me turn now to the adequacy of this philosophical theory of genealogy to the relevant works of Nietzsche and Foucault. Genealogy arose amid nineteenth-century historicism. It had forerunners, notably in David Hume’s speculative account of the psychological origins of morality in customs and habits. But Nietzsche’s work marks a break with such forerunners. The distinctiveness of his work does not consist in his using genealogy to critical effect. Hume (2007) had used his approach to critical effect in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, where Philo explains religion as arising from the states of terror that go with depression and illness. What distinguished Nietzsche’s genealogies was the radical nature of his historicism. Far from treating certain principles developmentally, Nietzsche searched for the contingent and accidental sources of the belief in principles. Hume had searched beneath cultural ideas and practices to discover continuous features of human life that could justify those ideas and practices by suggesting they reflected common experiences. Paul Rée’s (2003) genealogy used the idea of the survival of the fittest to argue that modern morality is the highest stage of evolution so far reached. In contrast, Nietzsche suggested that these earlier genealogies had failed to inquire critically into the historical origins of moral ideas.

Nietzsche reached genealogy from a background in historical philology. He had gone on to write historical studies on broader topics including the rise of tragedy. Many of his early studies are broadly documentary and thus compatible with the idea of history as an inductive science studying a progressive reality. The distinguishing feature of Nietzsche’s genealogies, including Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals, is that they are denaturalizing critiques. Nietzsche’s genealogies showed the historical contingency of moral ideas and practices. He argued, for example, that Christian morality had shifted the meaning of “good” from the opposite of “bad” to the opposite of “evil.”

Foucault’s use of genealogy is complicated by his debt to structuralism. His early archaeologies appealed to epistemes as quasi-structures. ⁴ They precluded historicism and left him no way of explaining the change from one episteme to another. In contrast, his genealogies introduced temporal complexity and contingency. He replaced epistemes with multiple surfaces in constant states of emergence, displacement, conquest, and flux. Where his archaeologies had presented a series of discrete synchronic moments, his genealogies introduced history as diachronic movement. Foucault’s genealogies differ from his archaeologies, therefore, not in their critical intent but in their reliance on something like radical historicism. Out went the homogeneity and structural logic of epistemes. In came a greater sense of diversity and contingency.

3. Historical Ontology

Genealogy arguably works not only as immanent critique but also as a more Kantian type of critique. Here the idea of a historical ontology captures the way genealogies can reveal the conditions of possibility of some objects. When objects come to exist only as a result of contingent historical conditions, genealogies that trace those conditions also provide an analysis of the conditions that made those objects possible.

Radical historicism illuminates how genealogy operates as historical ontology as well as immanent critique. When radical historicists reject the idea of social kinds with essences, they adopt a constructivist social ontology. Constructivism implies that social objects become possible only under contingent historical circumstances. The conditions of possibility for social objects are, in other words, that individuals historically happened to hold particular beliefs and perform certain actions. Thus, a genealogy of those beliefs and actions is a historical ontology of the related social object. Genealogies explore the historical ontology of social objects. They reveal the contingent conditions that make social objects possible.

Although genealogy might seem to have the same critical effect on all its objects, the critical effect of genealogies actually varies with the epistemological and ontological nature of the beliefs and objects they explore. Consider the critical impact of genealogies on objects with different ontologies. The relevant ontological distinctions arise from the way radical historicism can combine a nominalist antiessentialism with a kind of realism. As radical historicism emphasizes contingency, it undermines attempts to define social objects by reference to essences that determine their other features and it thus leads to a broadly antiessentialist view of social concepts. However, this antiessentialism does not entail antirealism. On the contrary, radical historicists can fend off antirealism by insisting that there is a real world that beliefs track. This combination of antiessentialism and realism points to a distinction among socially constructed concepts. Some constructed concepts capture parts of social life (pragmatic concepts); others do not (unfounded concepts). Genealogies of these two types of concepts have different critical effects.

Unfounded concepts do not capture any real commonalities among objects. They have no real content. Although people assume that the concept refers to a type of object characterized by certain resemblances, there is no such type. The concept suggests that objects share resemblances they do not. Genealogies of unfounded concepts trace the histories that led people wrongly to treat objects as instances of a type characterized by shared features. These genealogies undermine the belief in the adequacy of the relevant concept and so any actions and practices associated with that concept. If people believe a concept picks out a genuine type characterized by family resemblances, a genealogy can challenge that belief by showing that there are no such resemblances and that the concept arose for other reasons. The genealogy shows that the concept is a myth. It shows that people are falsely ascribing imagined properties to a group of objects.

Genealogies challenge the mythology of unfounded concepts. An example is Roland Barthes’s account of the associations of the concept “wine” in French society. ⁵ Barthes showed that “wine” does not only refer to a type of drink; it symbolizes health, national identity, and social equality. He argued that this symbolism is arbitrary; indeed it ignores the health hazards of excessive drinking. He suggested that the symbolism arose from a wish to sell wine and a bourgeois tradition of nationalism. He implied that although wine is a type of drink, there is no type “wine” that is healthy, French, and egalitarian—that concept of wine is a myth.

Unlike unfounded concepts, pragmatic concepts pick out real types. Pragmatic concepts refer to objects that share family resemblances but not an essence. They have vague content and fuzzy boundaries that someone can define and justify by his or her purposes. Pragmatic concepts are socially constructed in that it is people who decide to divide the world into one set of types characterized by one set of family resemblances rather than another. However, although these concepts are socially constructed, they are satisfied by a group of objects that really do share certain resemblances. Genealogies of pragmatic concepts reveal the contingent historical processes by which people came to cluster objects together in one way so as to capture one set of resemblances rather than another way to capture another set of resemblances. These genealogies can challenge pragmatic concepts in one of two ways. First, they can show that the original justification for adopting a pragmatic concept was that it contributed to a purpose we no longer believe in. In these cases, we will not think our beliefs wrong or our concepts mistaken, we will merely think that they do not serve us well. Second, genealogies will undermine the beliefs associated with a pragmatic concept if people mistakenly believe the concept refers to a group of objects with a common essence. When people believe a concept is a unique reflection of natural kinds found in the world, a genealogy can undermine that belief, showing the concept to be just one of several ways of dividing objects into groups. In these cases, the genealogy works as an immanent critique in that to accept the truth of the genealogy is to imply that one’s earlier beliefs were false. These genealogies show people that their concepts are reifications. They show people that they were treating products of human activity as if they were given independent of such activity.

Genealogies challenge the reification of pragmatic concepts. A possible example is the concept of “democracy” as it appears in the social science literature on democratic peace. Democracy is not a natural kind. There is no straightforward dichotomy between states that do and do not have an essential feature or set of features that do or do not make them democratic. The term democracy refers, rather, to a vague set of beliefs and actions including popular sovereignty, voting, representation, participation, competing parties, and accountability. We decide what beliefs and actions to include and what not to include as democratic, and we can justify our decision only by reference to our purposes. Furthermore, the properties and behavior of a democracy do not arise simply from its being a democracy—or at least they do so only tautologically if we include the relevant properties in our definition of a democracy. The nature of any given democracy depends instead on the contingent beliefs and actions of particular people. Nonetheless, social scientists sometimes treat democracy not as a pragmatic concept but as a natural kind. They sometimes reify “democracy”, operationalizing it to formulate and test correlations such as that which suggests democratic states do not go to war with one another. A genealogy might remind them that “democracy” does not refer to a natural kind that inherently has peaceful relations. It refers to sets of beliefs and actions that can lead to peace depending on historical contingencies and even on how they define its boundaries. A genealogy might suggest that democracies have had peaceful relations not because of their intrinsic properties but because historically social scientists have altered their definitions of democracy to capture family resemblances among America and her allies (cf. Oren 2003).

It is worth pausing here to discuss in greater detail a particular type of pragmatic concept that is especially vulnerable to genealogical critique: self-fulfilling concepts. Although self-fulfilling concepts are pragmatic, genealogies reveal them also to be akin to myths. These concepts are pragmatic in that they collect objects that share a property or set of properties. Yet these objects share the relevant property only because people have adopted and acted on the concept that ascribes that property to those objects. It is only because the concept informs practices that it can refer to a real type. If people did not act on the concept, it would be unfounded. Genealogies can thus have a special critical effect on self-fulfilling concepts. Genealogies challenge the reification of self-fulfilling concepts as they do the reification of any other pragmatic concept. If people believe the concept refers to natural kinds or provides a uniquely apt way of capturing types in the world, a genealogy can undermine this belief. In addition, however, genealogies challenge the artificiality of self-fulfilling concepts and practices based on them. When genealogies denaturalize a self-fulfilling concept, they imply that it was initially unfounded and only later, because it altered practices, did it come to pick out a real type. These genealogies undermine not only the claim that the concept refers to a natural kind, but also the claim that the concept arose as a reflection of a previously existing social type.

Genealogies challenge both the reification and the artificiality of self-fulfilling concepts. All social concepts are self-fulfilling in that they refer to types that arise from actions predicated on people having certain concepts. However, some social concepts refer to types that do not depend on people having that particular concept. For example, capitalism may refer to a set of economic relations that can exist even if people have no concept of capitalism. Other social concepts are more directly self-fulfilling. A possible example is the idea that girls are bad at science. A genealogy might show how this idea arose as a contingent extension of normative ideas about the role of women. Then once this idea arose, people began to alter the way they spoke to girls, the academic subjects they taught girls, and the pursuits they encouraged girls to adopt. As a result, girls really may have come to do less well than boys in science.

Critical theorists should not ignore the different critical effects that genealogy has on different objects. The distinctions between unfounded, pragmatic, and self-fulfilling concepts are important. They are not just philosophical niceties. They have substantive ethical and political consequences. For example, they explain how critical theorists can reject essentialist definitions of race and gender while recognizing racial and gendered types exist in society today with harmful results. Critical theorists can accept that racial and gendered types are valid as pragmatic concepts (not natural ones) and then argue that these types are self-fulfilling ones. Furthermore, a critical recognition of the pragmatic force of racial and gendered types is a precondition of any account of the nature and effects of such types, not to mention a precondition of social policies that seek actively to transform such types. Once we undermine self-fulfilling concepts and eliminate their social effects, we might leave them to the historian. Until then, however, we have to use the pragmatic concepts we challenge as self-fulfilling if we are adequately to discuss their social effects and how best to undermine them.

4. Ideology Critique

Radical historicism can sustain not only genealogy and historical ontology but also a revised version of ideology critique. Radical historicism seems to be at odds with a Marxist view of ideology as a false consciousness that reflects distorted social relations (Foucault 1980a, 118). Radical historicism undermines the idea that consciousness passively reflects material relations, and it challenges the suggestion that critics have privileged access to a scientific truth by which to judge ideological beliefs to be false. Nonetheless, I believe it would be a mistake to conclude that radical historicism cannot sustain ideology critique. Clearly, because radical historicists oppose reductionism, they cannot define ideology as a passive reflection of a distorted material life. However, they can define ideology in terms of distorted beliefs.

A distinction between proper and distorted consciousness can inspire an analysis of ideology critique as exposing distorted forms of consciousness. However, radical historicism precludes both the identification of distorted belief with false belief and the identification of proper belief with any substantive content including the real interests of a class. Radical historicism here implies that any viable distinction between proper and distorted belief is a conceptual one. A radical historicist theory of ideology should thus contain three parts. First, the theory should analyze distorted belief in terms of the inner constitution of consciousness. The distortions in an ideological superstructure do not reflect the conflicts of a material base. They arise as failures in consciousness itself. Second, the theory should include an account of the reasons people have for adopting distorted beliefs. As social relations do not determine consciousness, agents must adopt distorted beliefs for reasons of their own. Finally, the theory should consider how distorted beliefs spread through society.

Consider the analysis of distorted belief. ⁶ To avoid equating distorted beliefs with false ones, radical historicists must define proper and distorted belief by the inner constitution of consciousness. They need a normative account of the proper workings of consciousness against which to identify distortions. This normative account might be that as people are intentional agents capable of local reasoning, so proper beliefs are conscious and rational. A norm of consciousness requires that people hold beliefs intentionally for reasons they could acknowledge. If people repress their beliefs and desires in their unconscious, the beliefs they express are not their actual beliefs. They can carry on telling themselves they hold the beliefs they express only by refusing to acknowledge their actual beliefs. A norm of rationality then requires that people’s beliefs be internally consistent. If people hold inconsistent beliefs, they hold beliefs that they themselves regard as deficient since one implies the falsity of the other. So, distorted beliefs are either unconscious or irrational. Either way, the distorted nature of the beliefs requires postulating a split in the agent’s intentionality. The agent has two different webs of belief that cannot come together. With the unconscious, there are the beliefs that they think they hold and the beliefs that they repress. With irrationality, they hold two webs of belief consciously but these cannot fit with each other.

Consider now the nature of the reasons people have for adopting distorted beliefs. Proper beliefs are those people adopt because they appear true. Belief-formation gets corrupted when people hold or express beliefs in accord with a preference other than for holding true beliefs. Distorted beliefs are, in other words, products of rogue preferences. Unconscious beliefs arise when rogue preferences lead people to repress their actual beliefs. For example, if politicians deceive themselves into believing that they will win an election, their conscious beliefs are a form of wishful thinking. Their preference for winning has led them to repress their unconscious belief that they will lose. The act of repression requires that the effect of the rogue preference and the unconscious beliefs remain outside consciousness. Self-deceivers remain unaware of what they do. An observer typically justifies ascribing unconscious beliefs and rogue preferences to self-deceivers by pointing to a tension between their actions and their expressed beliefs. Some irrational beliefs also arise from the influence of rogue preferences. In so far as “cold” irrationality lacks motive, reflecting something like a chemical imbalance or a lack of intelligence, it resembles a mistake and is probably irrelevant to ideology critique. Yet, hot irrationality has a motive, so it resembles self-deception. The differences are that in hot irrationality, the two webs of belief must contradict each other and the agent can be aware of what is going on. For example, politicians could consciously believe they are going to win an election while also knowing they are kidding themselves and they will lose.

Consider, finally, the spread of distorted beliefs through society. From a radical historicist perspective, ideologies, like power, do not have a center; they do not spread because of the real interests of a group. Distorted beliefs need not even serve the preferences of the people who hold them; although people adopt distorted beliefs because of rogue preferences, the beliefs need not succeed in serving their purpose. Like power, ideologies spread not outward from an alleged center but variously across intricate webs. Their diffusion occurs through the contingent beliefs and actions of individuals. Ideologies could conceivably spread because several individuals adopted the same distorted beliefs due to similar rogue preferences. Usually, however, distorted beliefs become a widespread ideology only when people begin to adopt them as proper beliefs. Ideologies spread beyond their origins in distorted belief only when other people adopt them sincerely and consciously. Here the spread of ideologies typically reflects restrictive and constitutive power. Restrictive power refers to the way other peoples’ actions influence what someone can do. Ideologies can spread as a result, for example, of censorship restricting what people can read. Still, ideologies usually spread at least in part because of the plausibility of the ideas in them. Here constitutive power refers to the role of contexts in giving people their initial webs of belief. Ideologies typically spread because people inherit traditions that make them seem plausible or even inherit them as part of a tradition.

This radical historicist theory of ideology replaces reductionism and scientism with a conceptual analysis of distorted beliefs and their diffusion. Ideologies are not the reflections of distorted social relations but products of distortions in consciousness itself. Ideologies contain distorted beliefs because consciousness is split by rogue preferences. Equally, however, ideologies characteristically take on a life apart from such distortions, spreading through society because of their plausibility and the actions of those immersed in them.

This theory of ideology echoes themes that are sometimes found alongside genealogies. A good example is Nietzsche’s (2007) account of ressentiment in On the Genealogy of Morality, where he combined genealogy with a type of ideology critique that suggested certain moral values were products of the unconscious effect of rogue preferences. On the one hand, Nietzsche used a genealogy to challenge the idea that “good” refers to actions or people that resemble each other in being altruistic. He argued that the actions and people that are called “good” do not constitute a type based on family resemblances. Sometimes people use “good” in contrast to “bad” to refer to aristocratic and noble qualities. At other times they use “good” in contrast to “evil” to refer to aesthetic, self-denying, and altruistic qualities. Nietzsche also suggested that the latter qualities are called “good” not because of an intrinsic goodness in them but as a historical myth. On the other hand, Nietzsche used ideology critique to provide a psychological explanation of this myth. He argued that this “slave morality” arose as an expression of the ressentiment the weak feel toward the powerful. The weak come to hate the strong, but they do not seek revenge through action, as would the noble. Instead, they deceive themselves into believing that they are good and so will gain everlasting life whereas the strong are evil and will be punished. For Nietzsche, the slave revolt in morality occurred when people repressed their sense of weakness and inferiority, unconsciously reassigning blame for it to an external enemy on whom they would get revenge in the Last Judgment.

5. Conclusion

This paper has examined the resources for critique associated with radical historicism. Radical historicism can provide analyses of genealogy and of historical ontology and even suggest a way to revitalize ideology critique. Genealogy relies on radical historicism to denaturalize beliefs, actions, and practices that present themselves as inherently rational or inevitable. By thinking of genealogy as a historicist form of critique, I defended it against charges that it collapses into self-defeating relativism and totalizing critique. Genealogies rely on claims about the truth of historicism and the histories they tell. These truth claims allow them to unsettle perspectives that present themselves as given in a way that ignores historicism. Also, by relating genealogy to historicist ontology, I distinguished the effects genealogy has on different objects. The critical import of genealogy varies across unfounded, pragmatic, and self-fulfilling concepts. Finally, ideology critique is compatible with genealogy but different from it. Ideology critique relies less on historical unmasking than on psychological unmasking. It exposes the ways rogue preferences lead to the distortions associated with the unconscious and with motivated irrationality.