The Uses of Biography

Abstract

Biography shares a number of the same pressing, essential methodological questions which are raised in contemporary historiography. These questions concern its relations with social sciences, the question of the relations between norms and behavior and between groups and individuals, as well as the issue of the limits of human freedom and rationality. This article stresses the unexplored complexity of the biographical perspective, offering a typology and an analysis of the implications of biographies that break with the linear and factual tradition.