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Although such polarities are held by relatively few, the central claims of both contain an element of truth. History’s heroes may be great individuals, but all individuals, great or not, are—indeed must be—culturally bound; where else could they act out the drama of their heroics?

In this sense, history and biography may be modeled as a massively contingent multitude of linkages across space and time, where the hero is molded into, and helps to mold the shape of, those contingencies. For Sidney Hook, in his classic study The Hero in History, a hero is “the individual to whom we can justifiably attribute preponderant influence in determining an issue or event whose consequences would have been profoundly different if he had not acted as he did.” History is not strictly determined by the forces of the weather or geography, demographic trends or economic shifts, class struggles or military alliances. The hero has a role in this historical model of interacting forces—between unplanned contingencies and forceful necessities.

Contingencies are the sometimes small, apparently insignificant, and usually unexpected events of life—for want of a horseshoe nail the kingdom was lost. Necessities are the large and powerful laws of nature, forces of economics, trends of history—for want of 100,000 horseshoe nails the kingdom was lost. Elsewhere I have presented a formal model describing the interaction of these historical variables (see chapter 10), summarized in these brief definitions: contingency is taken to mean a conjuncture of events occurring without perceptible design; necessity is constraining circumstances compelling a certain course of action. Leaving either contingencies or necessities out of the biographical formula, however, is misleading. History is composed of both; therefore it is useful to combine the two into one term that expresses this interrelationship—contingent-necessity—taken to mean a conjuncture of events compelling a certain course of action by constraining prior conditions.

Contingent-necessity is actually an old concept in new clothing. The Roman historian Tacitus was uncertain “whether it is fate and unchangeable necessity or chance which governs the revolutions of human affairs,” where we have “the capacity of choosing our life,” but “the choice once made, there is a fixed sequence of events.” Karl Marx offered this brilliantly succinct one-liner (from The Eighteenth Brumaire): “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past.”

A question arises from this: Can we find a repeatable pattern in historical sequences that demonstrates when and where contingencies and necessities will dominate in the life of an individual? Contingency and necessity vary in both influence and sequential position within any given historical sequence according to what is called the model of contingentnecessity, which states: In the development of any historical sequence the role of contingencies in the construction of necessities is accentuated in the early stages and attenuated in the later.

To tell the story of someone’s life, then, the biographer must understand not only the contingencies and the necessities of the individuals history, as well as the history around him, but the nature and timing of their interaction. The biographer must see which conjunctures of events compelled certain courses of action (contingencies constructing necessities), and which constraining prior conditions determined future actions (necessities creating outcomes). In other words, we must know not only the life and the times of the person, but how this life and those times interacted, when, and in what sequence to produce the outcome in question. As an exemplar of both biography and this particular philosophy of biography I suggest the life of Gene Roddenberry told by his biographer David Alexander, who has skillfully reconstructed