Or Faubion. For my money, the most challenging disquisition on the prevalence of the paranoid and its proximity to anthropological forms of investigation and knowing is the first chapter to his Shadows and Lights of Waco. Find it here: http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/7190.html.

A sample: ‘the phenomenological proximity of social and paranoid experience does not merely suggest that paranoia is itself a social, not a psychological, phenomenon. It further suggests that each of the two modalities of experience implicates the other… Such skepticism, in turn, finds it readiest and perhaps most pure methological instrument in what might be called a semiotique du soupcon, a semiotics of (the) suspicion, of the inkling, the clue, or trace.’ (p. 13)

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For those of you interested in conspiracy theory –as this is dealt with by anthropologists– I have a few further suggestions; in addition to George Marcus that is…

Harry G. West and Todd Sanders, Eds. Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

K.S. Brown & D. Theodossopoulos, ‘The performance of anxiety: Greek narratives of the war at Kosovo’, Anthropology Today, 16(1), 2000, pp. 3-8.

David Sutton, “‘The Foreign Finger:’ Chaos, Conspiracy Theory and Holistic Thought in Greece”, in K.S. Brown and Y. Hamilakis (eds.) The Usable Past: Greek Metahistories. Lanham MD: Lexington, 2003, pp.191-210.

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In so far as neoliberalism is a theory developed in the sphere of Marxist or pseudomarxist critiques, it must necessarily be the opposite of a conspiracy theory. After all, Marx spent much more time in Capital explaining the pressures under which capitalists like his buddy Engels lived to the workers, than the reverse. It’s just a social theory of power.

So, given that, what distinguishes a conspiracy theory world view from a social theory seems to be that social theory is

• purportedly based on a set of confirmable data, and
• therefore falls into a broader range of acceptable arguments.

[It is, of course more complicated than this - social theory often produces far too little actual confirmable data to prove its arguments, and conspiracy theory most often produces far too much confirmable data, strung together by intricate theories.]

So perhaps a better way of distinguishing them is that (good) social theory explains why people do what they do on the basis of the society in which they live. It does this by building a theory of society, and keeps from turning into conspiracy theory through

• attempts to limit the theory to the fewest possible facts and explanations
• rejects associationism as a form plausible argument
• seeks to limit the influence of individual intention in social explanation.

In contrast, (bad) conspiracy theory

• piles theory on top of theory, often in situations where one unproven theory is used to prove another
• finds proof in association
• and relies on the bad intentions of individual human beings or individual groups to explain society.

I originally thought you were going somewhere else with the notion that conspiracy theory and social theory do the same work. I suppose I thought that you were saying that both theories

• attempt to arrange ideas in such a way that facts make sense
• and that they both do so by attempting to make (imagined or real) ‘secret’ facts ‘public ideas. (i.e., through revelation of the conspiracy, or through analysis of culture, economics, etc.).

Sorry to ramble.

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Doesn’t Joe Masco write on paranoia? As far as I can see, the only difference between conspiracy theory and social theory is institutional licensing. And often the conspiracy theorists write better.

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