The Claims of Experience

Abstract

Abstract Why have so many figures throughout American history proclaimed their life stories when confronted by great political problems? The Claims of Experience provides a new theory for what makes autobiography political throughout the history of the United States and today. Across five chapters, the book examines the democratic crises that encouraged a diverse cast of figures to tell their stories: Benjamin Franklin amid the revolutionary era and its aftermath, Frederick Douglass in the antebellum South and in abolitionist movements, Henry Adams in the Gilded Age and its anxieties of industrial change, Emma Goldman among the first Red Scare and state opposition to radical speech, and Whittaker Chambers amid the second Red Scare that initiated the anticommunist turn of modern conservatism. These authors made a “claim of experience”: a life narrative that offers its audience new community by restoring to readers and author alike from prevailing political authorities the power to remake and make meaning of their lives. Whereas political theorists and activists have often seen autobiography as too individualist or a mere documentary source of evidence, this theory reveals the democratic power that life narratives, both written and spoken, have offered both those on the margins and in the mainstream. When successful, claims of experience redistribute popular authority from unsettled institutions and identities to new democratic visions. This book offers both a method for understanding the politics of life narrative and a call to anticipate claims of experience as they appear today.