The Value of Conspiracy Theory

Abstract

For several decades, many historians and cultural critics have lamented a primal pathology of American culture, tendency of political leaders and their followers to view the world in conspiratorial terms (Curry and Brown vii). Coincident with this condemnation, of course, is denial of the validity of conspiracy theories one recent study defines them as fears of nonexistent (Pipes 1) which are read, rather, as symptoms of broader cultural dynamics. But more is at stake here than the conspiratorial outlook itself: the methodological protocols of interpreting conspiracy theories explain much of the critical interest, such that one prominent historian of early America, Bernard Bailyn, interrupted his analysis of The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967) with A Note on Conspiracy. At issue for critics of American conspiracy theory, then, is not simply the more reliable description of events or culture, but, more fundamentally, a saner understanding of that culture. This essay attempts a methodological rehabilitation of conspiracy theories on the dual assumptions that the eighteenth century was rife with actual conspiracies and that conspiracy theories from that moment offer valuable insights. But as with the adversaries of conspiratorial consciousness, my concern will be primarily methodological. An explication of conspiracy theories, I argue, provides the contours for a necessary theoretical program uniting structural and cultural analysis. Accordingly the first part of this essay surveys the dominant historiographical critiques of conspiracy theory, highlighting important similarities between the republican synthesis school and poststructuralist literary