The Genealogy of Genealogy: Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Coils of Critical History offers a bold and timely reassessment of one of the most influential methods in the contemporary humanities.

Turning genealogy back on itself, Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm investigates how it became a dominant paradigm for doing history—and what it means that scholars now routinely historicize everything but their own tools.

Blending intellectual history with philosophical analysis, the book offers fresh readings of Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Foucault, situating them in their historical contexts while challenging familiar narratives about their relationships to theory, method, and critique. It also charts the intertwined development of history and philosophy as academic disciplines, reconstructing genealogy’s surprising entanglements with eugenics, racial essentialism, and power. A method often wielded to criticize authority, Storm shows, has long carried unexamined legacies of its own.

Yet this is more than a critical project—it is a philosophical reckoning with the limits of historiography itself. As genealogy has hardened into a default genre of scholarly suspicion, The Genealogy of Genealogy calls for rethinking its epistemic foundations and political stakes. It also recovers a lost possibility: an insurgent, joyful counter-knowledge glimpsed primarily in Foucault’s private writings.  The book thus ultimately opens a path toward alternative historiographies, encouraging scholars to imagine new methods and possibilities.

Provocative, incisive, and deeply interdisciplinary, this is essential reading for anyone working in the humanities or critical social sciences—anyone ready to ask critical history where it came from, what it’s doing, and where it might lead.

You can order a copy from University of Chicago press here or from wherever you get your books….

Please stay tuned for further details and additional content.

First update: I’ve posted a pdf of the introduction and table of contents here if you’d like to read an excerpt.

Second update: Some early reviews/expert responses are now out (as of 7/10/2026). Early days, but I’m thrilled that it has been so positively received so far! Here are some quotes the press thought to highlight:

“An eminent historian …. [Storm] first reads history philosophically, treating historical narratives as sites of conceptual and theoretical reflection. He then turns this inquiry back upon itself, subjecting philosophical forms of historical interpretation to historical analysis… An intellectual tour de force.”-H-History-and-Theory (Full review here)

“An important contribution…. I thoroughly recommend the book to anyone interested in Foucault and Nietzsche, and I think it will have a lot to say to debates about historical methodology in the humanities and social sciences.” -Stuart Elden, Progressive Geographies

“An evocative work of immanent critique, The Genealogy of Genealogy exposes the epistemic dangers, institutional hierarchies, racist filiation with eugenics, and moral hypocrisies embedded in ‘genealogy’ as critical method. Storm brilliantly foments ‘genealogical anxiety’ in this Foucauldian reader through a powerful call to meet critique with world-building, to recognize contingencies alongside continuities, and to displace genealogy’s hegemony with the urgent ethical and political needs of our present. Storm’s labyrinth is Foucauldian in ethos, fascinating in critical force, and disruptive of moralizing critique.” Niki Kasumi Clements, Rice University

“Storm has confronted an evasive problem: What are we to do about genealogy once we understand it as a method of inquiry and a social worldview tied to racial hierarchies? His answer is historically and philosophically nuanced but clear about genealogy being used to advance the power of some while imperiling others. It is a book that will leave us talking about the genealogical method again-though this time not as a benign tool but as an orientation that disavows its own history.” Terence Keel, University of California, Los Angeles