Table of Contents
This essay poses three questions. Why is biography isolated from epistemological debates in political science? Are biographers confined to the archive and the tools of the historian? How do we explain our story? Biographers confront many issues specific to their particular art form (see for example Pimlott 1994, 169-61 and the chapters by Arklay and Bolton in this volume). But they can also confront core issues of theory, method and language central to the enterprise of political science. Yet, whether we look at biography through the spectacles of either mainstream or post-modern political science, both dismiss biography.
As an approach in mainstream political science, biography is criticised because it lacks analytical rigour and does not offer law-like generalisations. For example, Blondel (1969, 5) has consistently argued that both historical and case study methods are limited not only by lack of data but also by their inability to compare and explain systematically the structure and behaviour of governments. The case method is suitable for describing unique events and great men but it does not allow generalisations. It does not ‘provide guidelines by which to abstract from reality the "critical" elements which would provide the material for comparisons on a large scale' (Blondel 1981, 67). In a similar vein, James (1992, 254) notes the many ministerial biographies, autobiographies, memoirs and diaries ‘are often not much use to a student of Whitehall’. In the jargon of social science, quantitative, middle-range analysis is nomothetic analysis — that is, it is systematic and fosters generalisations — whereas biography (or case studies or a historical narrative) is idiographic analysis — that is, it is descriptive, focusing on the unique (Riggs 1962, 11).
If we take off our mainstream spectacles and wear those of postmodernism, the critique of biography is even more withering (if that is possible). The contrast between the mainstream political science and the post-modern project is sharp (see Bernstein 1991). The former strives after simplification and successive approximations to a given truth. The latter rejects such truth claims, accepting there are multiple realities and no foundations for asserting the superiority of one interpretation over another. Thus, Rosenau (1992, 118 and 120-21) includes a constructivist and contextualist theory of reality, in which reality is treated as a linguistic convention, among the core beliefs of postmodernism. In other words, ‘to the extent that the mind furnishes the categories of understanding, there are no real world objects of study other than those inherent within the mental makeup of persons' (Gergen 1986, 141). Moreover, '[i]f language itself is relative and even arbitrary, and if language is the only reality we know, then reality is, at most, a linguistic habit’. 'There are no independently identifiable, real world referents to which the language of social description is cemented' (Gergen 1986, 143). So, ‘all knowledge claims (all facts, truths, and validity) are "intelligible and debatable" only within their context, paradigm, or "interpretive community" (Fish 1989, 141) … 'Reality is the result of social processes accepted as normal in a specific context'.
Stanley Fish (1991, 13-15) states the dilemma for biographers neatly. He argues there has been a shift from a discourse of the self as a conscious subject endowing the world with meaning to a discourse which explains meaning as the product of epistemes, paradigms or structures beyond the grasp of the conscious subject. The self is ‘dissolved’, so ‘the notion of an intentional actor with a history and biography must dissolve too’. Any biography assumes ‘notions of agency, personhood, cause and effect’ that both govern our readings and are contested and contestable. What price the biography of an intentional actor in this post-modern world (and on this argument in historiography see Jenkins 1995 and citations)?
I want to contest both the mainstream and post-modern characterisations. I defend biographical studies by arguing that an interpretive approach deploying the notions of traditions, beliefs, and dilemmas and using the tools of the historian, the philosopher and the anthropologist can provide analytical narratives and diagnostic generalisations without making truth claims.
I now turn to each of my questions. First, I look at a possible interpretive theoretical approach to biography, focusing on the work of Mark Bevir (1999). Second, I look at methods, focusing on cultural ethnography and using the insights of Clifford Geertz (1973). Third, I examine the role of language and forms of story telling in writing narratives, focusing on Hayden White (1973). I do not claim any of these authors provide the right answer. I do argue these are major issues that biographers can address.