Genealogia e filosofia politica. Una proposta di integrazione

[BOOK IN ITALIAN] Political philosophy is primarily a normative discipline. It is concerned with establishing what we ought to do—how to organize society, how to share burdens and benefits, what institutions we should have and how to regulate them. Genealogy, on the other hand, is a purely empirical type of inquiry, which aims to reconstruct the causal history of our ideas, concepts, practices, and institutions. Contrary to much of the orthodoxy of the field, which draws a sharp distinction between facts and values, causes and reasons, this book argues that the kind of understanding offered by genealogy is highly useful for the normative purposes of political philosophy, and proceeds to demonstrate this with concrete examples. Standing within an intellectual tradition whose forerunners include Hume, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Bernard Williams, and in dialogue with contemporary political theory, it will be of interest to philosophers willing to reflect critically on what philosophy is and how it should be done.