ABSTRACT
Sève wrote about how biography should be. He stressed the evolution of the personality over time under the impact of events, noting that many biographers appear to operate with an assumed model of the personality that allows ‘background’ events such as family and politics to have an influence only until adulthood, but not after. Sève’s preferred biographies are therefore massive affairs, encompassing not only the individual paraphernalia of existence, but the broader sweeps of history that drive the circumstances and in turn shape individual biography. The chapter examines all this, but also throws out some challenges. In particular, what is the practical impact of shifting focus from a Marxist to a more general social form of biography, and what are the broader limitations on writing the kind of biography Sève advocates?
