Politics has a temporal dimension in that it is a field of action and these actions occur in time, have a temporal extension, and are temporally ordered. That much is obvious to every political agent. Politics also has a historical dimension in that the actions that define it are temporally unique events, are datable, and can be perceived, described, and analyzed as parts of a single narrative. But this is not necessarily understood by those engaged in such actions. They may be thinking of themselves as engaged in day-to-day struggles without seeing those struggles as belonging to a uniquely unfolding chain of events.

The temporality and historicality of political events are of no special concern to normative political thinkers. The political naturalist may have an interest in both, but his concern with time and history tends to be narrow and specific. This is certainly true of Aristotle. He speaks of the invention of the polis as a unique event; he thinks of the preferability of the constitutional order of the polis as historically variable; and in his Constitutions of Athens he maps out a constitutional history of the democratic Athenian state. But for all that, historical considerations remain marginal in his treatment of politics. Biologically oriented political naturalists like de Waal are interested in evolutionary history but tend to take a truncated view of human history as if it were a mere extension of the evolutionary process, evolutionary history pursued by other means. In contrast to both political normativists and political naturalists, the diagnosticians have an intensive interest in the historical aspect of politics. I have sought to make that evident already in the writings of Marx and Nietzsche and will continue to emphasize this point in my discussion of Schmitt, Arendt, and Foucault. But the diagnosticians’ concern with history is a specific one, determined by their diagnostic intentions. Nietzsche’s word for this approach to history is “genealogical.” Genealogy is meant to be a history of the development of a practice or an institution or a concept, one that is concerned with the present state of that practice or institution or with the present use of the concept and that seeks to understand this present condition in terms of how it came to manifest itself historically; genealogy is furthermore meant to lead to a critical reassessment of the practice, the institution, or the concept under investigation.