Post #527

What I hope to show is that "paranoid" interpretations are often complex and self-defeating attempts to preserve a familiar concept of subjectivity. They stem from a desire to think sociologically about agency while simultaneously retaining a concept of individual action that is at odds with sociological work. They sometimes amount, then, not onIy to a self-defensive posture in the face of external controls, but to a fraught and paradoxical defense of liberal individualism itself. T. Melley - Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (1999), p. 23