The paranoid style in Marxist-communism

 Conspiracy theory all the way down. Karl Marx accused Bakunin and Lord Palmerston of being Russian spies. And earlier wrote this . . . 

" . . . The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie . . ."

Since every modern nation acted as a branch office in 1848 its easy to see why there were never any more modern wars after that date . . .oh wait.

Legal scholar Franz Neumann critiqued the "conspiracy theory of history "

The phrase "conspiracy theory," in the sense that people use it today, became popular in the wake of commentaries like Karl Popper's and Neumann's.

 Franz Neumann, a Marxist legal scholar delivered a lecture on the "conspiracy theory of history"  He delivered that lecture on the conspiracy theory of history a few months before his death in 1954.

Neumann eventually ran directly into the conspiracist headwinds himself: Sen. Joseph McCarthy, a Wisconsin Republican known for throwing around accusations of red sympathies, cited the scholar as an alleged loyalty risk.

McCarthy was infamous for being sloppy with his charges, a fact that the book duly relates. But then the story takes a turn: According to the archives opened after the USSR collapsed, McKenzie-McHarg informs us, Neumann did, in fact, spy for Moscow during World War II. It wasn't exactly Cambridge Five–scale espionage—the book quotes an amusing cable where Neumann's higher-ups complain that their agent "does practically nothing"—but it still was espionage against the United States, even if the spy was a bit lazy. In the case of Franz Neumann and the red-hunters, the conspiracy theory turned out to be correct.

Neumann was personally acquainted with the subject of McKenzie-McHarg's second biography: He and Hofstadter were colleagues at Columbia University, and Hofstadter likely supplied some historical examples for Neumann's 1954 lecture. Hofstadter's appearance in Hidden History is no surprise: "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" may be the single most cited article ever written about conspiracy theories.