A friend pointed me to this, I’d missed it—it’s Kathy Olmsted on the British radio program(me) “Little Atoms” back in July, talking about how, as the host says, “once upon a time Americans would be concerned about the Catholics or the Jews, but there’s a distinct point where the government became the focus” of conspiracy theory—and other insights from this book, which, as you know, you should buy if you can.
Program summary here, MP3 here.
As Kathy says, at around World War I, “A lot of Americans start to believe that their government is lying and covering up and conspiring because it is starting to lie and cover up and conspire.”
1 comment
September 9, 2009 at 4:14 pm
serofriend
Jeffrey Pasley presented a paper on Conspiracy Theory and American Exceptionalism for the Bernard Bailyn symposium awhile back. I think his summary of Gordon Wood’s republican paranoid style interpretation is effective insofar that it lays a groundwork for critique concerning recurrence and “rational” conspiracy theory. He mentioned in a blog post that the paper warrants revision and updating. Here’s a sample:
Bailyn and those who followed him in taking conspiracy theory seriously have added an element to this standard image, and that can be most succinctly described in one word: rationality. Easily the most brilliant version of this idea appeared in a 1982 William and Mary Quarterly article by Gordon Wood. Criticizing Hofstadter’s “paranoid style” thesis and psychological interpretations of the origins of the American Revolution more generally, Wood argued that the near-universality of conspiracy theories in the 18th century was not a psychological malady but instead a by-product of Enlightenment rationalism. It grew out of the contradiction between an increasingly complex and unpredictable political, social, and economic world and a new conviction that everything that happened in the world could and should be rationally and naturally explained. “The belief in plots was not a symptom of disturbed minds,” Wood wrote, “but a rational attempt to explain human phenomena in terms of human intentions and to maintain moral coherence in the affairs of men.” Conspiracy theory thus represented “an enlightened stage in Western man’s long struggle to comprehend his social reality.”