Abstract Summary
By recognizing the essential, lived dimension of the ideas people use to organize their thinking about the world, biography has the potential to restore motivating ideals to historical understanding. In this paper I will develop this thesis by considering the ways the idea and ideal of reason were supported and shaped in the lives of a family that flourished from the middle of the eighteenth to the end of the nineteenth centuries. All of the members of this family were convinced that reason defined their essence as human beings, and although some of the details changed over time, all were essentially agreed on the basic parameters of the reason that defined them as human thinkers. Nonetheless, over the course of their lives, their ideas of reason were severely tested by their lived experiences. Their conviction that the ability to reason constituted the essential definition of what it was to be human was challenged by efforts to establish a constructive relationship between English gentiles and Jews, by the intense experience of raising young children, by harrowing confrontations with sudden and untimely death. Biography offers a means of restoring the negotiations between the idea of reason and these lived experiences to the historical record. By so doing it deepens our understanding of the directions in which ideas of reason developed, in response to their role as an ideal that shaped human lives.
