Political Biography: A Polemical Review of the Genre

My "polemic" deals with the biographies of statesmen who operated in the context of established systems of law, conventions, and accountability, and not with dictators and more or less absolute monarchs. I argue that unless abiographer contextualizes his/her subject in order to deal with (a) problems of vaUdation; (b) the counterf actual problem of dispensability; and (c) connections between the "life" and the achievements, then the genre is not useful for understanding poUtical institutions, historical change, and the role of statesmen in history.