Conspiracy Theory Vs Hofstadter's Theory

After looking at the ways in which both Olmsted and Coale use Hofstadter’s theory as a base to extend their individual theories about conspiracy thinking I found that Mark Fenster, in his introduction to Conspiracy Theories, responds to Hofstadter in a very different way. Fenster argues that, while Hofstadter’s theory was the most dominant form of understanding conspiracy at his time of writing, it is flawed in that academics have wrongly dismissed conspiracy theories simply as something that is ‘pathological’. Conspiracy theories have played a significant role in history, culture and politics and within many of the social movements across America, therefore Fenster successfully calls for a need to rethink the current framework in which we