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The cultural production of paranoia has long been a concern of literary scholars. Even before the recent proliferation of conspiracy theories about, for instance, a child-sex ring in a Washington, DC pizza parlor, scholars of American literary studies, in particular, have been noting among cultural producers a rearticulation of counterconspiratorial fictions – in essence, fictions that describe totalizing conspiracies to be discovered and contested. Russ Castronovo, for instance, notes that the emergence of Wikileaks in the global mediascape recalls an eighteenth-century “printscape” of politically transformational frauds, leaks, and conspiracies. Early US printer Philip Freneau, Castronovo points out, lauded a democratic discourse characterized by outright falsehood. “If he prints some lies,” Freneau suggested of the archetypical country printer, “his lies excuse.”1 Castronovo and others – from Elizabeth Maddock Dillon to Duncan Faherty to Ed White – have returned to the scenes of counterconspiratorial politics, moreover, in response to important recent changes in the United States.2 They discover, finally, that fraudulent and paranoid modes of cultural production have long been constitutive of US democracy. One can perhaps best understand the project of returning to scenes of counterconspiratorial writing as continuous with Richard Hofstadter's foundational “Paranoid Style in American Politics” (1964), but with a key difference. Whereas Hofstadter interrogated democratic paranoia as a means of establishing the boundaries of consensus liberalism, and of excluding modes of political discourse that had no place within that framework, more recent scholars have suggested that frauds, leaks, lies, paranoiac mass movements, and imagined conspiracies are, in fact, continuous with American democracy itself.
This essay will return to Hofstadter's point of departure, the so-called US Illuminati crisis of 1798 and 1799, for two reasons. First, and most simply, I will offer a minor historical corrective to studies of the counterconspiratorial crisis in the United States. In the late 1790s, anti-Enlightenment writers in the Atlantic world fantasized about a secret society of Bavarian university professors who had masterminded the French Revolution and were spreading the spirit of upheaval to other nations, including Great Britain and the United States of America. They called this imagined cabal the “Illuminati,” both drawing from the name of an actual Bavarian secret society that had disbanded in 1787 and conjuring through wordplay the central metaphor of the...