CRABWALK: APPLYING PRAGMATIC GENEALOGY TO CONTEXTUALIST POLITICAL THEORY

Contextualist approaches to political theory share a common feature: they include statements about contextual facts in the justification of normative political judgments. This feature exposes them to the problem of critical distance, i.e. to the worry that an approach including facts about the context to be evaluated in the justification of the judgments evaluating it may entail a form of unduly conservatism or status quo bias. Is it thus possible to increase contextualism’s critical purchase without giving up its distinctiveness, i.e. without relying on external and fact-independent normative resources but remaining into the context? I argue that this is possible, and that genealogy makes a salient contribution in making it so. More specifically, I argue that pragmatic genealogy – the hybrid functionalist approach to genealogy pioneered by Bernard Williams, Edward Craig and Miranda Fricker – can provide crucial insights about the normative standing of contextual facts while steering clear from the genetic fallacy. My argument unfolds across three papers. In the first two papers, I put the method to test, showing that it can bring about different results. In the third paper, I take stock of the issue offering an account of the logic and practical import of the kind of genealogical arguments made in the previous two, namely the mix of justification and explanation known as vindicatory explanations.