Rewriting the Lives of Eighteenth‐Century Economists

OVER THE PAST THREE DECADES, historians of France, like those of other countries, have tried to make sense of the renewed vogue for scholarly historical biography.' The issue appears more problematic in French history, perhaps because of the long dominance of the Annales school paradigm, which privileged structures over events and collective over individual mentalities. The theories of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu likewise challenged the notion of coherent, linear selves that could be isolated from larger historical forces. Biographical enterprises that fastened on unique experiences seemed both trivial and methodologically and politically retrograde. By the 1980s, however, practitioners were growing increasingly frustrated with quantitative approaches that dismissed lived experience, precipitating a return to narrative. An ingrained mistrust of the biographical nonetheless continues to produce an unusual outpouring of self-reflexivity by those dabbling in the genre, especially in France.2 Scholars describe their endeavors as challenges or wagers, as if they risk eschewing their usual critical acumen, ascribe too much coherence to disorderly events, and are tempted to endorse a fictional construct in telling life stories.3 In the heyday of social history, one response was to approach biography as a case study, assessing, or even testing, the effects of social forces on individuals.4 But a renewed focus on the contingency of human history has begun to push biography in

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