Mysteries and Conspiracies: Detective Stories, Spy Novels and the Making of Modern Societies

The detective story, focused on inquiries, and in its wake the spy novel, built around conspiracies, developed as genres in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.During the same period, psychiatry was inventing paranoia, sociology was devising new forms of causality to explain the social lives of individuals and groups and political science was shifting the problematics of paranoia from the psychic to the social realm and seeking to explain historical events in terms of conspiracy theories.In each instance, social reality was cast into doubt.We owe the project of organizing and unifying this reality for a particular population and territory to the nation-state as it took shape at the end of the nineteenth century. Thus the figure of conspiracy became the focal point for suspicions concerning the exercise of power.Where does power really lie, and who actually holds it?The national authorities that are presumed to be responsible for it, or other agencies acting in the shadows