The Value of Conspiracy Theory
| Author | Ed White |
|---|---|
| Published | 2002 |
| Format | Research paper |
TL;DR — Literary scholar Ed White argues that historians wrongly dismiss early American conspiracy theories as paranoia, when they were often serious attempts to analyse systemic power.
Published in American Literary History 14, no. 1 (Spring 2002), pp. 1–31. White, a scholar of early American literature, takes issue with the tradition — associated with Richard Hofstadter and Bernard Bailyn — of reading American conspiracy theory as a cultural pathology or a fear of “nonexistent conspiracies.”
Working mainly from the Revolutionary and early-republic period, including the Antifederalist “Centinel” letters, he argues that conspiracy theories were often a way of describing collective and structural power before there was a better vocabulary for it, and that critics should read them as analysis rather than only as symptoms.
What it is: a peer-reviewed humanities journal article. The copy was downloaded through JSTOR.
Where this came from
- A copy saved in October 2026.
32 pages. A PDF copy is held in Kyle’s private archive; it is not linked or shared here.