Governance, Memory, and the Construction of Heroism: Narrative Legitimacy and the Institutional Classification of Political Action

This working paper develops narrative legitimacy as a provisional governance concept for examining how institutional classifications of historical actors affect recognition, political legitimacy, and authority. It synthesizes collective-memory scholarship, interpretive policy analysis, discursive institutionalism, narrative policy research, and legitimacy theory. The contested historiography of John Brown serves as a structured theoretical probe because the underlying historical event remains broadly stable while Brown’s public classification has shifted across political periods. The analysis rejects the assumption of a single state narrator and instead treats narrative production as distributed across governments, schools, publishers, scholars, markets, social movements, communities, and counter-publics. Authority Provenance is introduced in a bounded role: not as a general theory of historical sourcing or as a causal stage, but as an evidentiary discipline for tracing authority-relevant classifications, institutional adoption, transformation, correction rights, and present standing. The paper clarifies the conceptual and evidentiary questions that must be resolved before a formal causal framework can be established.