The political economy of suspicion: From critical cognitive work to conspiratorial closure

This article advances a political economic analysis of the transformation of critique into conspiratorial certainty in late-modern Europe. Arguing that this shift is rooted in the commodification and alienation of cognitive work, I theorize a mechanism centered around commodification-alienation-fetishization through which critique becomes a mass cultural commodity, detached from institutional mediation, and finally stabilized as ideological closure. Drawing on cases from France, Italy, and Germany, I show how post-1968 intellectual democratization, welfare-state erosion, and platformized knowledge economies have jointly produced a political economy of suspicion. The conclusion calls for a re-embedded critique grounded in collective cognitive praxis and democratized epistemic infrastructures.