On the Limitations of the Genealogical Method

In this paper, I explore the limitations of a Foucauldian-inspired genealogical approach for analysing the contemporary crises of democratic control over economic processes in capitalist economies. The paper is part of—and explores issues that emerged as part of—a larger book project, which is tentatively entitled Race(d) Futures: The Politics of Race and Risk. The book project explores the ways in which fairness in prediction and risk assessment has been conceptualised, operationalised, challenged and contested in the U.S. the 20th century, and early 21st century. More specifically, the book project traces how anti-racist social movements in the U.S. have sought to challenge the close imbrication of race-making and risk-making practices in insurance markets and the housing finance market—that is to say, how anti-racist social movements have sought to challenge the way in which private and public actors have deployed forms of risk assessment and prediction that were either directly and explicitly involved in the stabilisation and dynamic reproduction of the racial order in the U.S. (as in the case of de jure redlining), or have played role in veiling the reproduction of unjust social hierarchies. In many ways, the genealogical method has proven invaluable to this project. It has allowed me to trace distinct articulations of the imbrication of predictive practices and processes of racialization at different historical and political conjunctures, and has enabled me to explore the and roads not taken. It has led me, for example, to trace distinct challenges to actuarial power in insurance and housing finance markets, and helped me articulate the distinctive discursive contours of the contemporary political debate. However, while a genealogical approach has been immensely helpful in understanding how fairness in prediction and risk assessment has been conceptualised and challenged in a society marked by deep racial injustice, and how the conceptual and normative vocabularies of these past struggles continue to resonate in our present, it has left me without a clear normative language that can move beyond the political rationalities that I analyse. I therefore find myself at a crossroads at which I need to reintegrate the genealogical method with a more robust and explicit normative framework. In this paper, I would like to explore the possibility of using the analytical normative vocabulary of non-domination, as developed in recent debates on radical republicanism in order to orient political projects that allow for more democratic oversight of financial markets as well as interrupt the continued reproduction of past injustice (and offer some hope for repair and reparation for past injustice). My hope is that combining—if not necessarily reconciling—these two very different approaches will allow me to develop a normatively robust critique of financial markets that takes racial justice and economic democracy seriously, and understands them as fundamentally intertwined. Participating in this workshop would be immensely helpful in addressing and more clearly articulating these methodological questions that are so crucial to the larger book project.