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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2023

The biography : an adequate tool to understand the birth of political modernity?

Résumé

Biography, in Antiquity, aimed to measure the relationship between man and destiny. As such, it dealt primarily with “great men”, culminating of course in the lives of the Roman Emperors. The review of exact historical facts ultimately constituted less his primary purpose than the establishment, by the biographer, of a moral judgment. From this point of view, biography during the Christian Middle Ages is similar to this moralizing problem. Scientific modernity obviously no longer accommodates this type of justification. Since the moral edification of readers cannot be the object of a scientific enterprise, we can ask ourselves the question of why, since the Renaissance, have we continued to write biographies? Without delving into the idea of “genius” invented by the Renaissance and systematically theorized in the 19th century, we believe that a new kind of biography has been created to allow, above all, to understand the new relationship between societies and their population. The creation of “State”, this new way of naming political organizations since the counter-reformation, involves, it seems to us, a new way of writing and thinking about biography. What are we looking for, today, from companies such as the one proposed by the Institute for Cultural History of the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts when was created the New Slovenian Biographical Lexicon? What cultural, political and philosophical characteristics anchored in the long term does this project correspond to? This conference will seek to propose some reflections which obviously include the Slovenian approach in a broader movement of continuing biographical work in today's Europe.
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Dates et versions

hal-04221898 , version 1 (28-09-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04221898 , version 1

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Jérôme Roudier. The biography : an adequate tool to understand the birth of political modernity?. There's History in all Men's Lives, INTAVIA, Sep 2023, Ljubljana, Slovenia. ⟨hal-04221898⟩

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