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

by Luc Boltanski

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 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 Carre 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Sociology, History

320 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 16, 2012

About the author

Luc Boltanski is a French sociologist, Professor at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Paris, and founder of the Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale, known as the leading figure in the new "pragmatic" school of French sociology.

Reviews

[Karelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Plus 3 étoiles 1/2 que 4.

[Dimitrii Ivanov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Выполненное на несколько необычном для социологии материале (детективы, шпионские романы, "Процесс" д-ра Кафки) обсуждение вопроса, в основном, реальности реальности, того, что может быть за нарисованным очагом государства и закона. Мне показалось по жанру ближе к интеллектуальной истории. Читается без затруднений.

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

First, a minor point of correction to the description of the book here on Goodreads: The primary writers that Boltanksi bases his analysis on are Arthur Conan Doyle and Georges Simenon.

How does one rate an academic text like this? It is something you read only because you really want to. I thought I might learn something about the nature of conspiracies, and I did, I think, but after the early sections analyzing detective fiction, it becomes an analysis on the conceptualization of sociology in general. I continued to read almost just to prove to myself I could follow what Boltanski was describing, long after I lost interest in the topic at hand. I sometimes did follow his reasoning, and made it all the way to the end, footnotes and all. Yay?

Onward to more frivolous reads!

[Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun Book by sociologist Luc Blotanski that tries to examine how similar developments found in detective stories and spy novels of the late 19th early 20th century reflect values and assumptions found in psychiatry and sociology as they developed contemporaneously during that period.

Boltanski's analysis of detective stories and spy novels never seemed extensive enough to adequately make the claim for some of his connections but there are more than enough interesting ideas that he plays with and teases out to make one ponder. Although he is a French sociologist, he is pretty readable; he never comes across as too obtuse and boring as many with similar backgrounds tend to be.

[Gabi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Großartig! Neue Erkenntnisse über die Welt gewonnen! Ich empfehle es jedem! Demnächst mehr.