Bad History, Useless Prophecy: The "Paranoid Style" Revisited

I taught my first class on conspiracy theories at the University of Bonn in 2007. It was called "Conspiracy and Paranoia," and the first texts we read were Freud's classic case study of Daniel Paul Schreber (1911) and Richard Hofstadter's essay on the "Paranoid Style in American Politics" (1964). Over the past fifteen years I have taught this class in different versions, but this was the only time "paranoia" featured in the title and I never included Freud again. I now also teach Hofstadter a few weeks into the semester. The reason for that is the topic of this article. As I explain below, I have become increasingly skeptical about the usefulness of the concept of paranoia for understanding conspiracy theory. Thus, we now only discuss Hofstadter after I have introduced my students to more recent and, as I think, more useful theorizations of conspiracy theory.

I have even been thinking about removing Hofstadter from the syllabus altogether. His abstraction of "the basic elements in the paranoid style" across space and time (1996 [1964], 29) makes a lot of sense to many students and they are easy to grasp. The same goes for his association of conspiracy theory and paranoia. Consequently, for some students, Hofstadter's approach overshadows all other approaches that we discuss and that, to my mind, are more useful. Thus, there are students in every class who want to draw on Hofstadter for the case studies they undertake in their term papers and not on, say, Jovan Byford's account of the rhetorical maneuvers of conspiracy theorists, Timothy Melley's notion of agency panic, or Mark Fenster's analysis of conspiracy theory's interpretive and narrative strategies. Usually, I can persuade some students to adopt a different theoretical framework for their papers; others decide to stick with Hofstadter.

I have not yet removed "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" from the syllabus because it is impossible to overemphasize its importance for the academic engagement with conspiracy theories. One of the objectives of my class is to provide students with a thorough understanding of how the academic study of conspiracy theories has developed, and Hofstadter's essay remains one, if not the most influential contribution to the field. Anybody who studies conspiracy theories should know about it and the long shadow it has cast. Moreover, although my provocative title does not reflect this, I am well aware that the concept of the "paranoid style" remains enormously productive. My students tend to understand it well and often apply it expertly to phenomena ranging from sermons Samuel Parris preached during the Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 to the tweets of Donald Trump. Journalists and educators also often draw on the concept to understand, expose and counter contemporary instances of conspiracism. Most importantly, there is a direct line from Hofstadter to the cultural turn in conspiracy theories studies at the turn of the millennium, which has generated works that shape not only these disciplines' engagement with the topic until today but have had repercussions in many other disciplines.

Accordingly, I am torn about the association of conspiracy theory and paranoia because I consider it at the same time productive and helpful and problematic and harmful. (My perspective on it is that of a cultural studies scholar with a strong historical research focus who is often called upon to comment on manifestations of conspiracy theory in the present.) Overall, however, I wish to argue, the association has (had) more negative than positive effects. What Hofstadter says about the "paranoid style" in his essay also goes for the text itself: it "has a greater affinity for bad causes than good" (Hofstadter 1996 [1964], 5).

Nevertheless, in the first part of this article, after rehearsing Hofstadter's arguments, I focus on its positive impact because I wish to acknowledge the seminal works by Melley, Knight, and Fenster, which all take Hofstadter's ideas as their starting point and—to different degrees—revise, recast and reject the idea of a "paranoid style" of conspiracy theorizing to develop their own takes on the subject. It was these books that—to...