Hofstadter Revisited: How Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia Have Become

This essay will briefly review three recent books on the subject of paranoia and conspiracy theories in contemporary thought: George Marcus’ edited collection, Paranoia Within Reason: A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation (1999), Nancy Schultz’s edited collection, Fear Itself: Enemies Real and Imagined in American Culture (1999), and Timothy Melley’s Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (2000). None of the books is overtly psychohistorical but they do address topics and questions which are central to the concerns of psychohistorians. What I will do is look at the explanations suggested by some of the authors represented in these books and then try to expand some of these explanations from a psychohistorical perspective.