The Best Intellectual Biographies

Thank you for recommending five intellectual biographies. Perhaps we could start by introducing the concept of the intellectual biography, and what you considered when you were compiling your list of reading recommendations.

Intellectual biography is a wide and slightly disparate genre. We might think it means closely-written books that examine the evolution of a thinker’s ideas, but it can also mean a biography of a thinker in which the ideas and the life are carefully related. There are some classics, like J.S. Mill’s Autobiography, but a lot of them are highly discipline specific and only appealing to specialists. Who wants to read an intellectual biography of Freud, and get hundreds of pages of close examination of his ideas and their influences and fluctuations, these days, other than those with a committed interest in the subject?

I have tried to choose books that are compelling, and which do a good job of linking personality and thinking. There are many books I am sad to be missing out, like the highly entertaining Karl Marx: A Life by Francis Wheen, Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age by Alex Wright (a book I cannot recommend enough: there should be more biographies of failures!), Virginia Woolf’s diaries, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA by Watson and Crick, and How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer by Sarah Bakewell.

But this list is hopefully an introduction to several different types of intellectual biography. It’s a little idiosyncratic and personal, but all lists are to some extent. What they all do, in different ways, is link the personality to the ideas. It is poetry and logic together, as Mill said, that makes the true philosophy, and it is personality and ideas together that makes the true intellectual biography.

That’s a great way to look at it, and I think we will come back to this idea of how character and personality influence intellectual thought. You mention Mill—shall we start with John Stuart Mill, a biography by the philosopher Nicholas Capaldi?

This is the closest book on my list to a ‘straight’ intellectual biography, in that it is written by a philosopher and theologian who primarily wants to explore Mill’s ideas. Although he does tell you what what was happening in Mill’s life, it mostlyasks: What did he believe at this point? Where did he get that from? How did that change?

It’s a more scholarly book than the others on the list, a bit heavier. But I wanted to represent that kind of intellectual biography, and I don’t think there is a better biography of Mill.

I love Mill. I think he the most important thinker of the 19th century. His biographers have done moderately well—but for a man of towering genius, that’s not enough. This book, though it is primarily about ideas really understands Mill the person, and shows you the importance of Mill’s emotional reaction to the world in the formation and distribution of his ideas. It’s very nuanced.

“Intellectual biography is a wide and slightly disparate genre. We might think of closely-written books that examine the evolution of a thinker’s ideas”

Capaldi really understands that Mill was quite a physical, romantic person. He understands that Mills’ body of work has to be read all together. You see a lot of people online who quote from On Liberty, and be either ‘for’ or ‘against’ it in some way. But that book makes a lot more sense when you have read the essays ‘Bentham’ and ‘Coleridge’ essays, or A System of Logic or The Subjection of Women. You have to integrate it all to see the bigger picture.

Capaldi does that. He’s also very good on the relationship with Harriet Taylor, Mill’s wife, who was absolutely crucial to how Mill finessed some of his ideas, fundamental. She was part of the driving energy of how John Stuart Mill—the economist and logician who wrote two major textbooks of the 19th century—became the great polemicist who said to Victorian society: We’re too conformist, too conventional, not intellectual enough. We don’t care enough about civilisation. We should be feminists. We should take religion seriously without being religious fanatics… all these things that now sound like common sense, but were in fact radical ideas that got him classed as either an eccentric or asa true genius, depending on the partisan divide..

Mill is seen now as a liberal hero. But he was also one of the great poetry critics of the 19th century. He wrote some of the best essays about theism. He was a very, very broad, deep, synthetic thinker. Capaldi really gets this. He takes him seriously. And you will understand Mill so much better through this book than through the other biographies.

A couple of the books on your list deal with marriage or life partnership very directly. I suppose, traditionally, people might not talk so much about the domestic sphere when writing about intellectual history. But I suppose we are the product of all the conversations we have all day, every day; the way you were brought up, of course, is important, but so is your primary romantic relationship.

Yes, this comes out very well in the debate about Mills and his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill. Mill said Harriet was fundamental to his work, an equal partner, but this claim has been disputed ever since their deaths. (And while they were alive by some of their gossipy acquaintances.)

John and Harriet spent a lot of time apart, often for health reasons, and wrote to each other. So even though most of her letters were lost we do have a sense of their intellectual interdependence. They don’t always write in great detail about their work, but they refer to their conversations and their discussions. Clearly, it was a marriage of minds.

We can see her edits on the Autobiography. They are not always detailed, intellectual edits, but she made some big decisions. You get the sense that she is going to go and sit next to him and talk about these edits. Like Mill said, their conversations were fundamental to the work.

So even though Harriet Taylor’s own writing isn’t as important as Mill’s, we get the sense that there was a close working relationship between them that significantly informed how Mill produced much of his work.

Mill says again and again and again that this work would not exist without her. Without Harriet Taylor, Mill might not have written The Subjection of Women, which is a towering achievement; it’s polemical, it’s logical, it’s intuitive. There were young women in the last quarter of the 19th century who slept with that book under their pillow. It became the inciting philosophical text of the global women’s votes movement.

What good is it to say, oh, well, Mill was already a feminist when he met Harriet? Okay, but it’s not the same thing as writing that book! It’s easy for intellectuals to collapse that distinction, but I think the ordinary person has a much better understanding that how you live and what you talk about is very important to your work.

We get a sense of what Harriet was like intellectually from her daughter (also a Harriet). There’s a letter from Harriet’s daughter to one of her friends, where she says: Don’t praise my work. I need you to tell me what is wrong with my work. She says: Mr Mill is too nice. He tells me that I am good. But I am very hard on Mr Mill and I tell him he must be very hard on me. She learned that from her mother, Mill’s wife. Her childhood seems to have been a lot of close attention: What are you thinking? Why are you thinking that? Are you really being good? Are you really doing your best?

These are the attitudes that Harriet brought to her marriage of minds with John. How would that not be fundamental to his work? It’s crazy to think that.

Through an intellectual biography, I suppose we gain some insight into the way we are all, always, being buffeted along all the time by the prevailing currents of our time. That must be important in helping us understand the significance of an individual: whether they became notable for standing in counterpoint to their contemporaries, or conversely for embodying some greater movement.

That’s why Mill is so interesting. He’s a synthetic thinker. In the ‘Coleridge’ essay, from 1840, he talks about how the ‘history of opinion’ is of people agreeing and disagreeing, but rather than being a clash of ideas, the opposing sides gradually oscillate into the centre; each reaction and counter-reaction gets us closer to a central point of truth. This was how Mill always tried to think, to be many-sided in order to see the truth.

That’s why intellectual biographies of Mill are so interesting. You’re in this oscillation of thought and counter-thought, reaction and counter-reaction. Mill said that both sides were telling the truth, but what is interesting is that they are not telling the whole truth. There’s a letter to Carlyle where he says, everything you’ve said is true, but it’s just part of the truth. I think about this every time I read an op-ed. It’s like: what I’m being told is the truth, it’s just missing lots of other important nuance. It’s an aspect of the truth.

Mill is the great philosopher of the oscillation, the great philosopher of both sides So much of our culture would benefit from having more of a “philosophy of oscillating to the centre.” And this Mill biography is a classic intellectual biography.

Clare Carlisle’s The Marriage Question also examines the impact of another unconventional life partnership. This book came out relatively recently, and examines the life and work of George Eliot, primarily through the prism of her controversial relationship with George Henry Lewes.

Reading George Eliot, and reading about George Eliot, is always very emotional. Clare Carlisle is obviously a very interesting philosopher, and what qualifies her as a good Eliot biographer is that she herself has translated Spinoza, and can talk about her work in expert terms. But the book is not short of emotional power; she clearly feels the impact of Eliot’s work and Eliot’s life. She does a bit of both. It’s nuanced and careful and brief. It’s really quite touching at the end. This is suitable, because George Eliot herself said that an appeal to moral sensibility through statistics and reason is not good enough. This is true; now we have behavioural economics telling us that people remember stories and they do not remember graphs, right? Eliot was saying this in the 1850s: you need to embed the idea in real talk, real actions, the real stories of a life.

Right, we have a very interesting interview with Rebecca Goldstein on the best philosophical novels. She said of Middlemarch: “you feel the movement of a philosophically sophisticated ethicist moving behind the scenes.”

I think Middlemarch is the most recommended book on Five Books, right?

It’s between Eliot’s Middlemarch and Mill’s On Liberty.

There you go. But the reason Middlemarch is one of the most successful books, ever, is because it’s not just a story, but a work of philosophy where the ideas walk around and come to maturity in the way that a life does. What George Eliot was saying was: if you explain life in abstract terms, what good is that?

In the 19th century they were grappling with questions of what it means to live in a humane way without God, the effect of political reform on small and prosperous communities (and vice versa), and how technological change affects moral behaviour. What does it mean to have a good marriage or a bad marriage? These are questions that were being written about insistently and incessantly in different terms. But the book that has survived above all is a novel that treats those questions seriously. Here’s what happens when this woman marries this man. Here, by the way, is how that might interact with the God question, the politics question, and all the rest of it.

Clare Carlisle shares with Eliot that dual aspect of the abstract and the particular.

This is the novel—and indeed the biography—as a form of applied philosophy.

Absolutely. And Carlisle blends it all very artfully. You don’t get lots on what Eliot was like as a child, we just get on with her life. But Carlisle writes about translations of Strauss or Feuerbach by Eliot, and how they impact her work. It has wonderful balance. It is so apt for George Eliot that it is not a straight biography nor a traditional intellectual biography, but sits somewhere in the middle.

One thing I appreciated about this book is that you do see Eliot at her weakest moments. There’s quite a shocking section where her partner’s son returns from the colonies a wreck and quickly expires from some horrible tropical disease; she seems wholly unsympathetic to his plight and wrapped up in her work and social life. Towards the end of her life, she remarries a much younger man—an obviously unsuitable match that suggests poor judgement or at least vanity on her part. But Carlisle is quite neutral on the topic.

The section on the marriage to John Cross is wonderful. To my mind, it’s one of the peak pieces of biographical writing of our times.

Cross had mental health problems and jumped out of a window during the honeymoon. It was absolutely devastating. As you say: why did she marry this man? Well, for practical reasons and emotional support reasons. Carlisle breaks the narrative and says: At this point, my editor told me ‘I don’t like her anymore.’ Then she offers us a wonderful explanation, a great George Eliot move, that sensitively handles the topic without pages of judgement and analysis but a brief interpretation. You have to feel your way through the complexities yourself. It’s just so deft. I really, really hope Carlisle writes more biographies.

I agree, she’s a very elegant writer. Nigel Warburton interviewed her for Five Books on the ‘philosophy of love,’ a topic that takes the domestic and emotional sphere seriously as an intellectual.

I think that’s a Victorian thing.

Really?

A lot of the great Victorian intellectuals were at home, they weren’t at the university. I know that sounds very trivial, but if you are George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, or John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill, you stayed at home to write your books. That’s just how it was. The great intellectuals of our own time are often professors and their work is much more institutional. I mean, Charles Darwin barely left his house after he got back from the Beagle voyage.

Shall we look next at James Froude’s Life of Carlyle? It’s an enormously long book.

I’m afraid it is, but I want to recommend specifically is the John Clubbe abridgment, which comes in one volume. It’s still 600 pages or so, but much shorter than the original, which is in four volumes.

Froude, being a good Victorian, thinks nothing of dropping 30 pages of Thomas Carlyle’s notebooks in to the text. Some readers might still want that, but the Clubbe abridgement is very good and just gives you the biography without the huge extracts. You’ll need to find this second hand, I think. But it’s one of the great biographies, to be reckoned with Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson.

It had a huge effect, created a kind of crisis in Victorian London. Because, I should say before we go on, that Carlyle was a brilliant thinker but he descended into a terrible right-wing racism and became a very, very unsavoury character who opposed the abolition of slavery and held all sorts of dreadful positions. This caused people to shun him, and he was also a bad husband.

That was the revelation of the Froude biography: a great man can be a terrible husband. Victorian London had a dizzying few weeks; this book had a wonderful effect on people, in the way a great novel or play might sometimes cause a society to look at itself and ask: is that really what we’re like?

But Froude, aside from that, is just such an entertaining writer. He’s so fluid. Clearly he has the requisite admiration of Carlyle, but whenever these questions of whether Carlyle was bad come up, he will move like a pendulum between ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ and constantly descend into the particulars.

Carlyle gave us the ‘Great Man’ theory of history, and Froude gave us the life of the man who gave us the Great Man theory. It’s constantly vexed as to the question of his greatness, which is a wonderful thing to have achieved. It’s so compelling.

The 19th century was the great age of the novel, and there’s a lot of very good writing in here, as there are in other books of the era like The Life of Charlotte Bronte by Elizabeth Gaskell.

You mean novelistic writing?

The opening lines of Froude’s Life of Carlyle are:

The River Annan, rising above Moffat in Hartfell, descends from the mountains through a valley, gradually widening and spreading out as the fells are left behind, into the rich and well-cultivated district known as Annandale.

You wouldn’t know if it were from a novel or not

It’s very similar, stylistically, to the narrative nonfiction that is now in vogue.

We think we invented creative nonfiction, narrative nonfiction. But that’s just a form of forgetfulness. The Victorians were very good at this.

Well, thank you for the recommendation, and for highlighting a particularly accessible edition. I think our readers will appreciate that. Let’s jump forward in time. Shall we talk about The Autobiography of Malcolm X? It was told to, and at least partly written by Alex Haley.

So the story is that Malcolm X was in a very busy period of his life. He would turn up in the evenings and tell Alex Haley the story of his life, and Haley would write it down. But Haley was a wonderful journalist, so he turned it into a great narrative. As with all great biographers, there’s clearly a sympathy between them but not necessarily a fawning sycophancy.

People think Boswell was an idiot who simply loved Johnson, but clearly he was very, very attentive, and he wanted to show us the totality of a person. I think Haley too does a good job of giving that to us. The voice is very well controlled, very well handled. It might be strange to think of it as an intellectual biography, but the heart of the book—to me—is how, when Malcolm X was at school as a teenager, he was asked by a teacher what he wanted to be when he grew up. He said: A lawyer. And the teacher responded: Don’t be silly, you’re black. You can’t be a lawyer.

Suddenly he realised he was living in a racist world, the whole thing became clear to him. He went on a terrible trajectory of not paying attention in school. There were drugs and crime, all these things. He ended up in prison, aged 20. In prison, he found religion, was drawn into a religious organisation, and became one of the great autodidacts in history. That episode in the book is just absolutely phenomenal: it’s an electrifying account of someone transforming themselves through self-teaching, which has to be one of the most important parts of intellectual life. That’s why I put this book on the list.

It’s also one of the great books of American self-invention, and a great coming of age book. It’s a page-turner in every sense.

It portrays Malcolm X as a political figure, but also the figurehead of a movement with an underlying philosophy.

You might view him solely as an activist. But clearly he was also a kind of public intellectual. He was a very different sort of character, and the Autobiography is excellent at bringing that out.

What you said about the relationship between Haley and Malcolm X is interesting. When viewing an individual in context, as an intellectual biography sets out to do, it does seem necessary to have a third party. Someone to interpret or psychoanalyse the subject.

I decided to keep ‘straight’ autobiographies out of this list. You could make a separate list of intellectual autobiographies. But, as you say, this qualifies because Alex Haley had such a big hand in it. But he, as a third party, did not bring full objectivity. There’s a more recent biography of Malcolm X by Manning Marable that is very good at pointing out where he was self-inventing earlier on, how much of this ‘autobiography’ is actually true. Haley was somewhere between an editor and ghost-writer; he anchored the book  in a sense of who Malcolm X was as a person, what his personality was, what his temperament was. If you take the view that all philosophy is temperament, all art is personality, then while The Autobiography of Malcolm X is as biased as any other auto-biography, it’s a very good record of the temperament behind Malcolm X’s philosophy (which was unsettled even in the weeks before his death). I think that’s just as valuable to capture, because people in the real world are often more persuaded by temperament than they are by ideas.

Well, this question of temperament as philosophy feels very present in your final book recommendation. This is Parfit by David Edmonds, which also appeared on our list of the best philosophy books of 2023.

This is a surprisingly good book. That might sound rude to David Edmonds, but I say it is ‘surprisingly good’ because Derek Parfit didn’t do very much. One of the things we associate with a good biography is action; Derek Parfit spent most of his life sitting in his room, listening to Wagner, and failing to write his books. Which is a nice little anecdote, but we’ve got 300 more pages to fill. What the hell can one say?

What David Edmonds does so well is to show you that even though Derek Parfit was the great modern philosopher of selflessness—which has been foundational to the effective altruism movement and other modern philosophies—his philosophy was closely associated with his personality.

Edmonds is very good at explaining Parfit’s ideas, and doing so in a way that is not oversimplified—but is also not the headache of reading Parfit’s original work. The real achievement of the book is to show you how Parfit’s personality changed significantly in later life. It also embraces this question of—as he became more reclusive and obsessed with his work—whether he, as some people say, became a cruel and selfish person willing to upset the people who loved him. Was he in some way neurodivergent? Had he masked it in early life?

Edmonds shows you how the emotions of the man could lead him to his ideas. My favourite moment is when Parfit, during a talk, said how sad it is that Bach died before finishing The Art of the Fugue. Then he cried—I think for 90 seconds—in the middle of this philosophy conference. That’s very representative. There are lots of anecdotes in the book about Parfit eating lunch at All Souls, talking about moral philosophy, and the person he was with would express a particular opinion and he would look physically pained before saying: ‘No, no, you mustn’t believe that; that would mean that torture is acceptable.’ And he would be clearly, emotionally upset. So he became reclusive, perhaps selfish, certainly very, very detached from the world. But he was also vibrantly emotionally responsive. That clearly, hugely informed his philosophical beliefs.

The question of how his personality affects him is that—in my reading of the book—he may have been more productive if he was less cossetted, if he had been forced to give more lectures. Maybe he would have worked differently? The book does a really good job of linking the personal with the philosophical. It’s a fascinating book. I spoke to a young philosophy student recently who told me that he walks around listening to it in Oxford. I think it’s a great example of how—a bit like George Eliot, a bit like John Stuart Mill, a bit like Malcolm X—the story of the individual can be just as interesting and motivating as the ideas themselves.

Anyone who studies philosophy of course must be interested in ideas. But the story of how they have been generated, and how they might be reflected or refracted in someone’s life—perhaps someone attempting to live by their own philosophy—  is extremely compelling.

If a philosopher says to us: You’re wrong about the nature of the self. You’re wrong about the nature of morality. Then we must immediately be interested in how that person has lived. What biography can do, in a way perhaps no other genre can do, is say: this is what it means to be an intellectual. This is what ideas actually look like. I think that’s very important.

My own book, Second Act, is half-biography, half-social science. You might read a chapter about network science or midlife crises, and think: Very interesting, but I don’t know how I could use that in my life. What you won’t forget is the story of how Samuel Johnson was plucked from obscurity by a coincidence of his network. Or how Frank Lloyd Wright had a midlife crisis and didn’t—like his father and mentor—become a hopeless alcoholic, but through dogged and sometimes very cruel determination make a second, rather brilliant, career. These stories will, as George Eliot said, give you the picture of life.

Who Parfit is, is not more important than his ideas, but is very important to the transmission of his ideas. Malcolm X affected the world with a force of personality as much as with his demands for justice. In art the question is often asked: can you separate the dance from the dance? Intellectual biography shows you that if we do separate the thinker from the thoughts, then we lose some of the persuasive and explanatory power of the ideas.