Doubting one's choices
Why research an individual in history? An elementary question I often pose myself, the congealed essence of my doubts about its worth: the worth of spending time, energy, and money. And the unrestrained feeling of having not enough of any of these things to fulfill my desire can not always be repressed. Perhaps I was motivated to find the most extreme method to not write the structuralist, the social history that seemed so beaten to death with a stick by endless analyses of documentations of inheritance conflicts, of succession, of appointments to office, transformed, at worst, into the abstraction of numbers and tables. On first glance, what is the thing that opposes the amorphous leviathan “Society” which remains at the heart, albeit obscured, by these symbols the most? Perhaps it is it the atomistic unit that forms the monstrum’s cells: the individual. At least, to me, that seemed, and still seems, to be the most intuitive answer. (But is it the best answer?) Decades ago, I mig...