Mysteries and Conspiracies (ePub)

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 -
bankers, anarchists, secret societies, the ruling class? Questions
of this kind provided the scaffolding for political ontologies that
banked on a doubly distributed reality: an official but superficial
reality and its opposite, a deeper, hidden, threatening reality
that was unofficial but much more real. Crime fiction and spy
fiction, paranoia and sociology - more or less concomitant
inventions - had in common a new way of problematizing reality and
of working through the contradictions inherit in it.

The adventures of the conflict between these two realities -
superficial versus real - provide the framework for this highly
original book. Through an exploration of the work of the great
masters of detective stories and spy novels - G.K. Chesterton,
Arthur Conan Doyle, John Le Carré and Graham Greene among
others - Boltanski shows that these works of fiction and
imagination tell us something fundamental about the nature of
modern societies and the modern state.