In this paper, I consider John French's biography, Lula and His Politics of Cunning: From Metalworker to President of Brazil (2020). French discusses his methodology, which he characterizes as “a social biographical approach”. I argue that this methodology is already in historians’ toolkit. Historians writing biography seem to start with first premises rather than building on what went before. I thus contextualize the methodology, situating French's biography of Lula within more general shifts in approaches to biography.

John D. French's stimulating article, which explores the scope for comparing working-class leaders across time and space, is considered in this contribution by reference to my biography of August Bebel and with a particular focus on the following topics: a) historical actors as shaped by their own particular time and place; b) the importance of personal relationships and networks in making people who they are; c) the importance of psychological elements and the risk in interpreting them in retrospect – recovering them depends upon the sources available; d) how charisma reflects an interdependence between attribution and individual qualities; e) the importance of political milieux for the flourishing of individual working-class leaders; and f) the relationship between political work to both civil society and existing class relations. Using these approaches allows us to write cross-border and cross-temporal “embodied social biographies”, as suggested by French.

There were times – not so long ago – when it seemed that historical processes could be dissected as though human action did not matter. Those times have changed. Nowadays, scholarly biography is enjoying broad interest, also among social historians, as is shown in this issue of the IRSH, in which John D. French explains how biography can contribute to a better understanding of global labour history. This contribution addresses three issues. Firstly, the relationship between agency (subject) and structure, or the role of the personality in history and society; secondly, the question of charismatic leadership, and finally, the question of how to deal with issues of necessity and coincidence and with the selection of leadership.

This comment discusses three topics. First, John French's biography of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is located in the broader trajectory of the production of biographical narratives of activists under the auspices of the historiography of the labour movement. Second, French's daring gesture of comparing the trajectories of Lula and August Bebel, who lived in such different contexts, and the impact of this in terms of a more sophisticated understanding of labour history in Brazil is discussed. Finally, we look at some of the challenges faced by writers of biographies of working-class leaders, notably in relation to the intersectionality between class, race, and gender.

The individual is still rare in working-class history, and, when we find them, they are often, like Bebel and Lula, exceptional. We are interested in them as leaders of vital mass movements and because they had an important impact on their societies. But another part of the promise of biographies like these is the opportunity to approach the personal dimensions of working-class experience through an individual life. Bringing the two biographies together highlights the diversity of working-class experience. Bebel developed in a racially homogeneous society while Lula was a mixed-race person shaped in race-conscious Brazil. Bebel thrived as a small-shop artisan while Lula thrived as a skilled worker in a mass production factory. I also compare and contrast these two subjects with two American labor radicals, the socialist leader Eugene Debs and William Z. Foster, a key figure in the Communist Party of the US. The importance of individual psychology and the homosocial worlds of these subjects might have played a greater role here, while the ubiquitous learning of both men raises the problem of working-class intellectual history, another subject that has not received enough attention from labor historians.

Luis Inácio Lula Da Silva, originally a metalworker and trade union activist, was president of Brazil from 2003 to 2010, leading the largest country of Latin America, with more than 212 million people. In 2020, social and labour historian John D. French, with a long career devoted to Brazilian labour history, published the much acclaimed biography Lula and His Politics of Cunning: From Metalworker to President of Brazil.1 In this book, French explicitly aims to give a bottom-up account of Lula's life.

Lula and His Politics of Cunning explores the origin, roots, and evolution of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva's vision, discourse, and practice of leadership as a process of becoming. This commentary invites historians of labor movements and the left to think beyond their geographical and chronological specializations. It argues that there is much to gain from thinking globally if we wish to achieve meaningful causal insights applicable to the sweep of capitalist development.