The Political is Personal: Methodological Principles for Using Political Biographies in Political Theory

This paper explores the need and possibility for integrating the personhood of politicians as documented in political biographies into present-day political theory. By personhood we mean the characteristics of politicians specific to them as human persons, particularly their personal development and their personality and character. Thus understood, personhood, while considered of prime importance in pre-modern political thought, is rarely acknowledged as a relevant factor in modern political theory. Although in their public commentaries political theorists often do assume that it matters (considering it highly important, for instance, who wins a presidential election), in their academic work, they tend to concentrate on abstract ideals, principles, and ‘actors’ and seem to forget that politics is the work of actual humans. Hence, the first goal of this paper is to investigate why that is the case: why have we forgotten about personhood? Next, after the diagnosis, a remedy is suggested. Fitting the tendency away from ideal theory towards more non-ideal and ‘fact-sensitive’ approaches, a better integration of personhood into political theory seems needed. This paper proposes to achieve this by better using political biographies in political theorizing. It is far from evident, however, how studying the biographies of single politicians can enrich our understanding of politics in general. Therefore, this paper’s second aim is to present a set of middle-range methodological principles for using political biographies in political theory. Thus, the paper in particular speaks to those who are open to the idea that personhood should be better integrated in our political theories and that using political biographies could be a promising way to do so.