Foreign Relations Biography and the Cultural Turn

Abstract

Disraeli called biography “history without theory.” The three essays under consideration here suggest that he was wrong. I am not sure that the “cultural turn” theorized or even changed the biographer's work, in foreign relations history or any other field. Indeed, poststructuralism is unfriendly to biography altogether, insofar as discrete subjects (and their authors) are either problematical or functionally dead, and the sort of narrative arc biographers tend to generate about their subjects is derided as contrivance. It was not Roland Barthes or Michel Foucault but Sigmund Freud who changed biography, writing to Carl Jung in 1909: “The domain of biography, too, must become ours.” Freud would make good on his pretension, exposing Leonardo da Vinci's alleged homosexual fantasies and doubtless embarrassing several of his own patients. Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918) was a covers-off indictment of four stuffy British characters and their Christianity. Erik Erikson would put Martin Luther and Mahatma Gandhi on the couch.1