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Psycho-biography, autobiography, intellectual archaeology: approaches to French liberalism

An estimate of Dennis Wood's biography of Benjamin Constant must depend in turn on one's faith in the explanatory value of psycho-biographical approaches. In the hands of a master-practitioner like Peter Gay, whose devotion to Freudian tenets is married to extensive cultural and intellectual analysis, there is little danger of facile reductionism, and the result is stimulating, and even persuasive, to the sceptic. By contrast, for this historian, Wood's attempt at retrospective analysis of Benjamin Constant's restless, ironic, acutely self-conscious character and inexhaustibly inquiring mind was an unsatisfying exercise, because it focused too narrowly on the psyche, and not enough on the dialogue of psyche with the its cultural and intellectual environment. What results is a chronicle rather than a portrait; facts are offered, but their significance is neglected, or at least underexplored, and Constant as thinker is eclipsed by Constant and his neuroses.