on a public sphere of circulating readers. This distinguishes autobiographical authority from that of biography, or even the private writing of the journal and diary. It is autobiography’s departure from the confession that best captures its appeal for anarchist anti-authoritarianism. and Watson define confession as “an oral or written narrative… addressed to an interlocutor who listens, judges, and has the power to absolve.” Though for Augustine was God, the confession can look to the state’s absolution as well, as in testimony or in pseudo-confessions like 1831’s The Confessions of Nat Turner. Both a genre in literature and religious epistemology, confession defines the individual in relation to an external, objective truth. A Catholic confession determines and expiates its author by way of God, morality and clergy; a court confession does so by way of the state, law and attorney. The historical transition from confession to autobiography thus shifts authority from an external source to one internal, whereas its publication requires public validation in kind. The transition from confession to autobiography’s individual and public authority is clear in Rousseau’s 1770 Confessions, often considered the first autobiography. He introduces the book as an exposition of its author not to God (as the title would suggest) but “to my kind.” In at least two instances, anarchists’ critiques of authority take up and turn down confession: Godwin’s 1793 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on Modern Morals and Happiness and Bakunin’s 1849 Confessions. In the former text, Godwin uses confession as an example of how society might turn religious authority to one more individual and communal; in the latter, Bakunin subverts the genre in favor of his own authority. In the 1793 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Godwin lays out three principles for what Isaac Kramnick calls his “utopian anarchism”: “political simplicity,” “public inspection,” and “positive sincerity,” resulting in a decentralized system of small, autonomous parishes bound
the history of the genre and these two critiques of confession, anarchist autobiography could be read as providing the sort of public transparency of Godwin’s utopia, or as subverting traditional, external authorities as in Bakunin’s text. The appeal of moving beyond confession for anarchists is that autobiography envisions a different understanding of the individual and her authority. A more transparent iteration of Bakunin’s confession to the Tsar would be Kropotkin’s account of life in tsarist Russia in his Memoirs of a Revolutionist, written not to appease any authority but to reckon with the conditions of the state that bore on the author’s upbringing. The autobiographical genre concerns itself with a form of authorization unlike the confession, invested in both the individual and her community. A second appeal of autobiography for anarchism is the genre’s ability to represent individuals outside state institutions. A constitutive element of anarchism’s critique of the state is its suspicion of representative institutions. In his 1870 “The Illusion of Universal Suffrage,” Bakunin critiqued the notion that “that a government and a legislature emerging out of a popular election must or even can represent the real will of the people.” As I discuss below, Goldman’s critique of suffrage as the “fetish” of feminist movements in the United States focused on those movements’ overlooking the severity of economic conditions at home and the inefficiency of the vote abroad. And yet largely because of this principled opposition to political representation, American anarchists in the late 19th century found themselves consistently at the mercy of judges, juries and lawyers that had few qualms making defendants the movement’s martyrs. Various autobiographies responded to these trials as a way of circumventing the narrow ideology and audience of court testimony, including the Autobiographies of the Haymarket Martyrs and Alexander Berkman’s Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist. These texts not only sought to