ABSTRACT
Patrick Weller is acknowledged as an expert on executive practice, bureaucracy and political institutions in Westminster systems, especially in Australia. Indeed, with the exception of one book, he might himself cavil at being so identified. Yet the recurrent resort to life history is integral to his method of analysing executive politics. This chapter highlights element of his work, asking how it illuminates his broader enterprise, and what it contributes to biography not as a humanistic pursuit, but as a social science. There can be vigorous dispute about the dimensions and effects of contemporary trends, but there is little doubt that there has been a renaissance of the debate over the structure versus agency question, which has dogged the social sciences ever since the Carlylean proposition that history is made by ‘great men’ was quite properly dispensed with. Weller contributes to this debate in innovative ways.
