The Concept of the Canon: Genealogy and its Contribution to Normative Arguments

In this paper, I claim that genealogy contributes to contemporary normative arguments through expanding the canon upon which our debates are built. First, I show how genealogy’s relationship with normative theory can be productive and not merely destructive nihilism, by utilising the work of Mark Bevir and the rebranding of truth as a “regulative ideal” (Bevir, 1999, p. 126). I offer a slight twist on this, by suggesting that genealogy is the regulative alternative to a contingent truth: with truth remaining the “regulative ideal” (Bevir, 1999, p. 126), as long as it is able to stand up to genealogy’s scrutiny and endure. Having established genealogy’s productive relationship with normative theory, I show how it contributes to normative discussion more specifically. I do this, by claiming that genealogy reminds us that what we debate often dictates and directs what we think: in a sense, how our political theory canon constitutes us as political theorists. With this realisation, I argue that genealogy encourages us to return to the concept of what a canon actually is: not just ‘what’ in terms of content, but in terms of form that affects content. This is not to reiterate social/political criticisms of who makes up the canon, something which has already effectively been done by the feminist perspective, but to re-asses that which has not historically qualified for it, because of its format: our normative arguments have long been founded on interpreting the great ‘Magnus Opus’ texts, without seriously considering other mediums, such as leaflets. In a new age of blog posts, message boards and twitter followers, this seems particularly stubborn. Thus, I subsequently claim genealogy reminds us that not only are the authors we read historically located, but so too is the idea of a canon itself: it was not just socio-educative limitations (such as low literacy rates and a male-dominated education) that were the background to its formation, but also technological boundaries of the written word, that shaped what we know as a canon today. As such, I argue we can understand how genealogy, within normative political debate, has a very important role in reconstructing the concept of a theoretical canon, around which much of our arguments are organized. I conclude that by performing this fracturing and fragmenting of a teleological, dialectical canon, and replacing it with a perspective of one formed within the technological and educative limitations of its day, genealogy allows for previously unconsidered (and disregarded) authors, mediums and approaches to the subject to infiltrate into these fractures alongside the Magnus Opus, which will inevitably affect the content that we debate over.