Description
Book SynopsisThe 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 act
Trade Review“An ambitious investigation of crime fiction and its relation to modern society”
Times Higher Education
Most of us take for granted the idea that the social world has a front stage made of rules and norms and a backstage of “intrigues,” “invisible plots,” and “hidden intentions.” When did that sense of a reality behind the reality of things develop? In this enigmatic book, Boltanski tracks down this new construction of a paranoid reality through a highly original reading of detective and spy novels, in which he detects the emergence of a sense that a sense that the real reality of things is concealed and malevolent. This book is both singular and provocative and resembles no other work of sociology I have read. It is a mixture of sociology of literature, of meta-sociological theory, sociology of institutions, and, perhaps mostly, sociology of modernity. It will be a needed complement to the classic The Social Construction of Reality.
Eva Illouz, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
Foreword
1. REALITY / versus / Reality
2. The Inquiries of a London Detective
3. The Inquiries of a Paris Policeman
4. Identifying Secret Agents
5. The Endless Inquiries of ‘Paranoids’
6. Policing Sociological Inquiry
Epilogue
References
Endnotes
