Problematizing Societal Practice: Histories of the Present and Their Genealogies Ulrich Koch Contents Introduction ....................................................................................... 2 Genealogy as Critique ............................................................................ 4 History and Critique .......................................................................... 5 Problematizing as Critique .................................................................... 7 Defining the Present .............................................................................. 11 Genealogy and the History of Scientific Ideas ............................................... 12 Praxis and Power .............................................................................. 14 Practicing Critique Through “A Historical Ontology of Ourselves” ........................ 16 Conclusion ........................................................................................ 18 References ........................................................................................ 20 Abstract The chapter discusses a mode of critical historical work often referred to as the writing of the “history of the present.” In the broadest terms, scholars who contribute to this genre place the study of the past in the service of a critical engagement with the present while committed to a radical historicism. To exam- ine the epistemological and ethical-political commitments of this approach, the chapter, first, distinguishes different forms of critique. Genealogical critique in the tradition of Nietzsche and Foucault, on which this critical historical practice heavily draws, represents a variant of critique that does not set out to reject what it critiques but to render it problematic and contestable. Second, the chapter high- lights two strands of recent scholarship written in this mode. On the one hand, authors have employed genealogy to study the fractured, nonlinear histories of scientific ideas and thought traditions in the human sciences, whereas another group of scholars has been more committed to Foucault’ s praxeological perspec- tive and the analysis of power relations. Building on these examples and a U. Koch (*) George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA e-mail: koch@email.gwu.edu © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 D. McCallum ed., The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4106-3_49-1 1