A Hunger for Narrative: Writing Lives in the History of Economic Thought

Historians of economic thought have always made use of life writing.¹ We draw on memoirs, correspondence, interviews, diaries, minutes of committee meetings, notebooks, and autobiographies as source material in our histories. But not since the multivolume biographical tomes of the Victorian age, skewered so definitively by Lytton Strachey (1918), has there been such an outpouring of biography and autobiography in all fields of inquiry as in recent decades. The history of economic thought has not been exempt. We have seen, over the past twenty years, full-length biographies of some of the major figures of our past supplemented by collections of biographies of less well known figures, and volumes of autobiography, interviews, and oral histories. This resurgence parallels developments in the history of science. Only very recently has there been any study of the development of the genre of science biography (see Shortland and Yeo 1996). Neither the status nor influence of life writing, nor the methodological challenges of the genre, has attracted much comment in the history of economic thought.

The most astonishing aspect of the recent revival of biography is that it exists at all. Since the end of the eighteenth century, the role of the merely personal in historical study has been an uneasy one. During the twentieth century, biographical writing in the history of economic thought weathered at least three significant challenges. The personality of the individual economist was attenuated in histories that made use of rational reconstruction. The sociology of knowledge literature undermined the role of the individual economist, who became a pawn in thrall to forces much greater than any individual. And the most devastating attack, from a philosophical perspective, emerged from postmodern literary criticism. If the subject itself is neither stable nor recoverable, the biographer's task becomes impossible. And yet biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs proliferate.

This essay reviews some of the literature related to life writing in intellectual history and attempts to account for its recent revival in the history of economic thought. The first section examines the intellectual challenges to life writing that have emerged over the past two centuries, from the scientific sensibilities of the Enlightenment to the “contested self” of postmodern discourse. The second considers two forms of life writing in the history of economics. Literary biography serves many of the same purposes as fiction and owes at least as much to the biographer as to the subject. Except possibly for John Maynard Keynes's Essays in Biography ([1933] 1972), historians of economics have made few attempts to exploit the genre's potential. By contrast, biographies written from the perspective of social history and relevant to examinations of the sociology of knowledge have played an important role in our discipline. They could be improved by adopting tools of qualitative analysis developed in sociology and other social sciences. Both literary biographies and social histories, however, are narratives, the similarities of which matter more than their putative differences in objectives. Recognizing the pervasiveness of narrative in the history of economics frees us to consider the potential of life writing, in terms of new ways of writing history, new audiences for our writing, and new ways of teaching. The final section does just that.

The Challenge of Life Writing

Thirty years ago, the first voices began to call for a resurgence of biography in the history of science. Thomas Hankins (1979) implored historians of science to consider biography as the test of broader theories of the development of ideas in science, but he had to title his plea “In Defence of Biography.” S. Shapin and A. Thackray (1974) made a similar case for “prosopography as a research tool in history of science,” a focus echoed in some recent interest in collective science biographies (Pyenson 1977; Elliott 1982, 1990; Sturges 1983; Abir-Am 1991; Abir-Am and Outram 1987). Larry Holmes...