In philosophy, genealogy is a historical technique in which one questions the commonly understood emergence of various philosophical and social beliefs by attempting to account for the scope, breadth, or totality of discourse, thus extending the possibility of analysis.
The later philosophy that has been influenced by Nietzsche, and which is commonly described as genealogy, shares several fundamental aspects of Nietzschean philosophical insight.
[3] In the late twentieth century, Michel Foucault expanded the concept of genealogy into a counter-history of the position of the subject which traces the development of people and societies through history.
Instead, it seeks to show the plural and sometimes contradictory past that reveals traces of the influence that power has had on truth.
Pointing out the unreliability of truth, which is often accused of "having a tendency of relativity and nihilism",[citation needed] the theory flatly refuses the uniformity and regularity of history, emphasizing the irregularity and inconstancy of truth and toppling the notion that history progresses in a linear order.