The self-representation of the individual life or ‘autobiography’ is not a
new phenomenon but has long development as a ‘cultural practice’ (Mascuch
1997). Even before the eighteenth-century Enlightenment conceptions
of political rights, religious discourses from the Protestant Reformation carried
notions of introspection. According to Mellor and Shilling, the legacy
of a ‘cognitive’ priority over the carnal can be found in the reflexive aspect
of current autobiography (Shilling and Mellor 1994: 125). For Porter,
within the Enlightenment ‘the traditional Puritan genre of spiritual selfexamination
was supplemented by more secular modes of confession’
(Porter 2000: 278). However, despite philosophical, literary and other
explorations of individuality, modern social sciences have tended to omit the
‘humanity’ of the individual in the pursuit of causal accounts, objective
study of the general patterns of human behaviour and standard features of
individuals drawn from natural science assumptions, procedures and principles
(Rustin 1999: 65). The ‘individuality’ of individuals and the diversity
of human meanings have been either neglected or relegated to a secondary
concern (a residue). This is not to say that a ‘humanist’ or ‘idealist’ strand of
thought has not existed within the social sciences. A complex body of
thought from Dilthey’s biographical study and Weber’s verstehen, the
phenomenology of Husserl and Schutz, Chicagoan interactionism (Park,
Mead and their followers) and Sartre’s existential procedure has had a ‘subterranean
existence’ in the social sciences (see Erben 1998b).