“Je ne contracte pas”: How conspiracy theorists help us, unwittingly, to understand our world

Interview with Le Nouvel Obs (March 29, 2026): Fabian Muniesa, a researcher at the CSI (Center for the Sociology of Innovation), answers questions from Rémi Noyon. In Paranoid Finance (Polity, 2024), “a strange and fascinating little book,” the author examines how conspiracy theorists conceive of value, finance, and banking. He demonstrates that these paranoid theories are merely the radicalization of the financial imagination in which we are all immersed. According to Muniesa, the best response is not to reestablish a clear demarcation between reality and fiction, science and belief, but rather to highlight the fragility of our conceptual frameworks—which would be all the more solid if they remained modest.