GENEALOGICAL CRITIQUE OF SOCIAL PRACTICES: NIETZSCHE AND FOUCAULT VERSUS HABERMAS

Abstract

Abstract: This article aims to elucidate Michel Foucault’s interpretive engagement with key concepts in Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy, to demonstrate their significance for the development of Foucault’s genealogical method, and to examine how, particularly in his polemic with Jürgen Habermas, genealogy becomes a question of the legitimacy of critique — namely, how critical interrogation of social practices remains possible. The central thesis is that Foucault’s genealogy, shaped through a selective appropriation of Nietzschean insights and positioned as an alternative to Habermas’s theory of communicative action, should not be understood as a search for universally valid normative structures. Rather, it constitutes a historically grounded framework for understanding subjectivity and social practices, enabling us to think and act differently, and thereby contributing to the ongoing task of freedom. The article argues that Foucault, instrumentally relying on Nietzsche, developed genealogical hermeneutics as an interpretive practice that is oriented towards a critical understanding of social practices permeated by mechanisms of power. A key divergence from Nietzsche lies in Foucault’s de-psychologization of agency: whereas Nietzsche often grounds knowledge and morality in the subjective tactics of individuals, Foucault treats psychological motivation as an effect of impersonal power strategies without strategists. The article further contends that the core disagreement between Foucault and Habermas concerns the relation between power, truth, and subjectivity. Foucault reverses the traditional dependency: rather than power being conditioned by truth and the subject, it is truth and the subject that are constituted through power. He critiques Habermas’s model of ideal communication as ahistorical and utopian, arguing that no discourse is free from power. Consequently, critique should not aim to abolish power, but to engage it through legal norms, techniques of governance, and an ethos that minimizes domination.