Conspiracy and Democracy: Recent Episodes
Cambridge University
How do conspiracies happen, how can historians use them to understand more about the past, and where do they begin and cease to be relevant to the study of history?
Conspiracy and Democracy, a Leverhulme-funded research project. More information is available at www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org.
Speaker: Dr Keith Kahn-Harris - Sociologist and writer
The term 'denialism' has come to be applied to a cluster of 'alternative' forms of knowledge, including Holocaust denial, global warming denial, anti-vaxxers, 911 conspiracism, creationism and more. In my forthcoming book Denial: The Unspeakable Truth, I argue that denialism arose in modernity as a result of a process in which, post-enlightenment, certain desires and political projects were rendered 'unspeakable' and impossible to legitimate publicly. Denialism is therefore a covert forms of advocating for and legitimating certain courses of action and ways of being in the world.
The 'alternative' to denialism is , therefore, a dystopian prospect; a world in which the unspeakable becomes speakable again. This alternative is more than a hypothetical possibility. There are signs of a transition occurring from denialism to 'post-denialism'. Post-denialism, embodied in the discourse of Donald Trump, eschews the masquerade of science and scholarship that defines denialism, in favour of a visceral kind of quasi-acknowledgement of that which is denied. This may signal a weakening of the boundaries of the speakable and a concomitant shift in the language of political possibility.
Dr Keith Kahn-Harris is a sociologist and writer. He is a senior lecturer at Leo Baeck College an associate lecturer at Birkbeck College, and a Fellow of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research.
The talk will be followed by a drinks reception in the Alison Richard Building foyer.
This event is being hosted by the Conspiracy & Democracy research project, a five-year project funded by The Leverhulme Trust and based at CRASSH. For further details about the event, please contact the project administrator, Rachael Taylor, here.
A public lecture with Scott Radnitz (University of Washington)
Abstract
This talk asks how conspiracy theories operate in partially democratic or non-democratic settings. Elites in these political systems are believed to strategically use conspiracies to distract, confound, and demobilize the public, yet cynical citizens often independently suspect their own leaders of being complicit in conspiracies. Conspiracy theories in weakly institutionalized societies thus highlight a paradox of political trust: Conspiracy belief involves both credulousness (toward the claimant) and suspicion (of the putative villain). This analysis uses original surveys of Georgia and Kazakhstan to understand how people reconcile official conspiracy claims with distrust of the state. Survey experiments test how they weigh official claims or denials against preexisting biases in determining culpability, and whether exposure to official conspiracy claims motivates pro-regime or repressive policy preferences. The results suggest that people are influenced more by commonsense judgments than elite claims about conspiracy, and that conspiratorial rhetoric does not necessarily translate into political support.
Biography
Scott Radnitz is Associate Professor in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies and Director of the Ellison Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies at the University of Washington. He does research on the post-Soviet region, covering topics such as protests, authoritarianism, informal networks, and identity. His book, Weapons of the Wealthy: Predatory Regimes and Elite-Led Protests in Central Asia, was published by Cornell University Press in 2010. Articles have appeared in journals including Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Democracy, Studies in Comparative International Development, and Post-Soviet Affairs. Policy commentary has appeared in Foreign Policy, The National Interest, Slate, and the Monkey Cage/Washington Post blog. He is currently writing a book on the political uses of conspiracy theories in the post-Soviet region.
This event is open to all and will be followed by a wine reception. No registration required.
This is part of a series of public talks from the Leverhulme-funded project Conspiracy and Democracy. More information at http://www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org/.
Enquiries - conspiracy@crassh.cam.ac.uk
A public lecture with Reza Zia-Ebrahimi (King's College London)
Abstract
Zia-Ebrahimi builds on recent comparative research on antisemitism and Islamophobia to argue that the two display similar dynamics in representing their target population as a different and antagonistic race (a process referred to as ‘racialization’). His research suggests that conspiracy theories of the ‘world Jewish conspiracy’ type, and their Islamophobic equivalent, the ‘Islamisation of Europe’ type, are powerful enablers of racialization, something that the literature has so far neglected. To show the similar dynamics of what he calls ‘conspiratorial racialization’, Zia-Ebrahimi provides a textual comparison between The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903) and Eurabia: The Euro-Arab axis (2005).
Biography
Reza Zia-Ebrahimi is a Senior Lecturer in History at King’s College London. His work is situated at the juncture between global intellectual history and ethnic studies. He has worked on the development of dislocative nationalism in Iran in the period 1860-1979, focusing on the hybridisation of European ideas of nation and race by Iranian intellectuals. Currently, his research centres on a parallel study of antisemitism and Islamophobia from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. The incidence of conspiracy thinking on strategies of racialisation is at the heart of this new research agenda.
This event is open to all and will be followed by a wine reception. No registration required.
This is part of a series of public talks from the Leverhulme-funded project Conspiracy and Democracy. More information at http://www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org/.
Enquiries - conspiracy@crassh.cam.ac.uk
A public lecture with Ilya Yablokov (University of Leeds)
This is part of a series of public talks from the Leverhulme-funded project Conspiracy and Democracy. More information at http://www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org/.
A public lecture with Dr Ieva Jusionyte (Harvard University)
Abstract
Guns and Mosquitoes: How Media Makes Emergency and Routine on the Argentine Border
Drawing from ethnographic research with news journalists in the tri-border area of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, this talk will examine the role of the media in producing, circulating, and contesting conspiracy narratives. From the 1990s, when securitization and militarization went hand-in-hand with sensationalist portrayals of the region as a haven of organized crime and terrorism, to the panics caused by the spread of tropical disease–first yellow fever, then dengue–over a decade later, local journalists in towns along the Argentina’s northern edge have remained mostly silent. Off the record, the media in the Province of Misiones has been fiercely criticizing the complicity of major Argentine news outlets in vilifying the border area–a process, which they saw as being driven by the interests of political and economic elites in Buenos Aires as well as in Washington, D.C. In this talk, I will discuss the disagreements about the events and their interpretations between local, national, and global media as a lens through which to understand social anxieties and insecurities in a historically marginalized and criminalized border region.
A public lecture with Ute Caumanns (University of Düsseldorf)
Abstract
The lecture considers the relevance of visuality and visual sources in conspiracy theory research. It argues that conspiracy theories are meant to be disseminated amongst a given public. To achieve this, they are communicated not only through written texts, but also with the help of speech and visualization. It is open to question, whether graphic images and visual representation can contribute to a chronological classification of conspiracy theory including pre-modern history.
The presentation focusses on post-war Eastern Europe, where to – following the Moscow Purge Trials of the late 1930s – the model of Stalinist show trials was transferred. Against the background of historical case studies from Stalinist Czechoslovakia, Poland and Eastern Germany, show trials are presented as performative acts as well as (multi)media events. Onstage, they offer an elaborate and refined narrative – in order to destroy someone politically and morally by means of fabricated recriminations, but also as a means to reinterpret history in conspiratorial terms.
Biography
Ute Caumanns teaches History at the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Germany (Dep. of History and Cultures in Eastern Europe). She holds a PhD in East European History from the University of Düsseldorf. For her dissertation she focused on political Catholicism in interwar Poland analysing the Jesuit press. Between 1996 and 2000 she was Researcher at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw, working on a case study on Public Health in the Russian Part of partitioned Poland, 1815-1915. Since 1999 she focuses also on conspiracy theories (Verschwörungstheorien. Anthropologische Konstanten – historische Varianten, coed. Mathias Niendorf, Osnabrück 2001; „Der Teufel in Rot. Trockij und die Ikonographie des „jüdischen Bolschewismus“ im polnisch-sowjetischen Krieg, 1919/1920“ in: zeitenblicke 10, 2 [22.12.2011], online available at http://www.zeitenblicke.de/2011/2/Caumanns/index_html [last access 04/01/2017]; Wer zog die Drähte? Verschwörungstheorien im Bild, coed. Lars Gronau, Christian Lange, Tim Mörsch, Düsseldorf 2012). Her present project on show trials in East Central Europe deals with conspiratorial narrative, performative and media aspects (“Der Feind im Innern. Stalinistische Schauprozesse und Verschwörungsdenken im Kalten Krieg“ in INDES. Zeitschrift für Politik und Gesellschaft 2015, 4, 80-87; „Verschwörungsdenken in der politischen Führung Polens im Kalten Krieg. Bierut, Berman, Werfel und der ‚Prozess der Generäle’“ in Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung 2016, 181-194). In 2014/2015 she was heading the student project Schauprozesse. Inszenierung und Medialisierung politischer Justiz in Osteuropa, online-exhibition available December 2015-December 2018 at http://www.schauprozesse.de.
A public lecture with Dr Federico Finchelstein (The New School, New York).
Abstract
Dr Finchelstein will analyze the history and memories of the Dirty War in Argentina after 1983. He will especially focus on the 'dictatorial memories' of the right and the extreme right. These memories were essentially defined by its conspiratorial takes on the recent history of violence in the country. Dr Finchelstein will stress how transnational and transcontextual histories of genocide played a key in first defining the ideology of the perpetrators during the Dirty War and then in the post-dictatorial conspiratorial reformulations of the past.
Biography
Professor Finchelstein is the author of five books on fascism, populism, Dirty Wars, the Holocaust and Jewish history in Latin America and Europe.
His forthcoming book is: From Fascism to Populism in History (University of California Press, 2017).
His last book, The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War (2014), focuses on the theory and practice of the fascist idea throughout the twentieth century, analyzing the connections between fascism and the Holocaust, antisemitism, and the military junta's practices of torture and state violence, with its networks of concentration camps and extermination. His previous book, Transatlantic Fascism (2010), studies the global connections between Italian and Argentine fascism.More than 50 academic articles and reviews by Mr. Finchelstein, on subjects including fascism, Latin American, American and European populism, genocide, and anti-Semitism, have been published in books and specialized peer-reviewed journals in a number of languages. He has been a contributor to major American, European, and Latin American newspapers and news media, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Politico, Reuters, Mediapart (France), El Diario (NYC) Clarin (Argentina) and Folha de S.Paulo (Brazil).
A public lecture with Dr James Harris (University of Leeds).
Abstract
Between the winter of 1936 and the autumn of 1938, approximately three quarters of a million Soviet citizens were subject to summary execution. More than a million others were sentenced to lengthy terms in labour camps. Commonly known as 'Stalin's Great Terror', it is also among the most misunderstood moments in the history of the twentieth century. The Terror gutted the ranks of factory directors and engineers after three years in which all major plan targets were met. It raged through the armed forces on the eve of the Nazi invasion. The wholesale slaughter of party and state officials was in danger of making the Soviet state ungovernable. The majority of these victims of state repression in this period were accused of participating in counter-revolutionary conspiracies. Almost without exception, there was no substance to the claims and no material evidence to support them. By the time the terror was brought to a close, most of its victims were ordinary Soviet citizens for whom 'counter-revolution' was an unfathomable abstraction. In short, the Terror was wholly destructive, not merely in terms of the incalculable human cost, but also in terms of the interests of the Soviet leaders, principally Joseph Stalin, who directed and managed it. The Great Fear presents a new and original explanation of the Stalin's Terror based on intelligence materials in Russian archives. It shows how Soviet leaders developed a grossly exaggerated fear of conspiracy and foreign invasion and lashed out at enemies largely of their own making.
Biography
James Harris is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Leeds. He is the author of The Great Urals: Regionalism and the Evolution of the Soviet System (1999) and co-author (with Sarah Davies) of Stalin's World: Dictating the Soviet Order (2015). He co-edited (with Sarah Davies) Stalin: A New History (2005), and edited Anatomy of Terror: Political Violence under Stalin (2013). He is currently writing a book on the origins of the Communist dictatorship
A public lecture by Professor Sir Richard Evans.
Abstract
After Napoleon's final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, the conservative regimes of the Restoration quickly developed a paranoid suspicion of conspiracies which, they feared, were being hatched to overthrow them. For their part, democrats across Europe formed secret societies like the carbonari, while groups of junior army officers from Spain to Russia plotted to remove Restoration governments and drive the programme of the French Revolution forward. This lecture asks why the politics of the 1820s were so dominated by conspiracy, and attempts to fit the dynamics of plot and counter-plot into the larger framework of the history of conspiracies and conspiracy theories in the modern age.
Biography
Sir Richard Evans FBA is Regius Professor Emeritus of History and President of Wolfson College at the University of Cambridge. He is Principal Investigator in the Leverhulme Programme Grant 'Conspiracy and Democrary' at CRASSH. His latest book, 'The Politics of Power: Europe 1815-1914', will be published by Penguin Books on 1 September 2016.
A public lecture by Dr Iain Lauchlan (University of Edinburgh)
Abstract
This paper investigates the fall of “Iron Felix” Dzerzhinsky. He was the creator of the Soviet secret police, Lenin’s fearsome enforcer and the man who many thought represented the last serious impediment to Stalin’s seizure of power. His death in the Kremlin in July 1926 had all the elements of a great theatrical production: timely relevance to the mood of the age, a grand location, and a stellar cast. In fact many observers found it difficult to believe that such a meaningful pattern of events could have been woven by accident alone and suspected that some hidden artist was spinning the web. This talk will explore the conspiracies and conspiracy theories surrounding Dzerzhinsky’s demise, in doing so it seeks to ascertain the true cause of his death and its significance.
Biography
Iain Lauchlan received his BA (1993) and PhD (1998) from the University of Leeds. His PhD thesis and first book (‘Russian Hide-and-Seek’) were on the tsarist secret police based on research in the newly opened Russian state archives. He began his academic career as a research fellow at Helsinki University in 1999, which thanks to Finnish Academy funding provided him with access to the former Communist Party and KGB archives in Moscow. This led to a British Academy Post-doctoral Fellowship at St Cross College, Oxford from 2001 to 2004 and after that a lectureship at Stirling University. He was appointed to his current post as Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Edinburgh in January 2010 and Senior Lecturer in 2016. He is currently completing a biography of the founder of the KGB, Felix Dzerzhinsky.
Between Diabolical Instigations and Criminal Combinations: Conspiracy Theories in Political Trials, 16th-19th century
A public lecture with André Krischer (University of Münster)
Abstract
Conspiracy theories were not only a conspicuous element of public discourses in early modern England, spread by countless pamphlets and other sorts of printed media since the late 16th century. They also played a crucial role in political trials. As a result of the specific understanding of treason in common law as an ’imagination of the king’s death’, a traitor was always a conspirator, in league with the devil. This narrowing of conspiracy and treason was an important factor for the popular understanding of conspiracies as a deadly threat to state and society. In my lecture, I will show how conspiracy theories became an indispensable element of the legal language used in treason trials and how such trials served as propagators of conspiratorial narrations. I will also look at the discursive changes that took place during the period under investigation. When treason allegations became critical around 1800, political crimes were reinvented as ‘seditious conspiracies’, still bearing the notion of dangerous subversions and machinations. While my lecture is primarily concerned with England, I will give a comparative perspective on conspiracy theories in political trials in the Holy Roman Empire and show how the legal definitions were influenced by the English model.
Biography
André Krischer studied history, philosophy and English literature in Cologne and Bonn. He completed his D.Phil. in 2006 and Habilitation in 2015. He is currently a Lecturer in British history at the University of Münster, Germany, where he is also a Principal Investigator on the DFG-Collaborativ Research Centre ‘Cultures of Decision Making’ (SFB 1150) and on the Cluster of Excellence ‘Religion and Politics’ (EXC 212). He is interested in the cultural history of diplomacy and foreign relation in the early modern world, the visual history of religious violence, the history of bureaucratic and parliamentary procedures of decision making and the history of political crime. The history of conspiracies is a major focal point in his forthcoming book on the history of treason and treason trials in England from the 16th to the middle of the 19th century (which will be published with Aschendorff Books in 2017) and also of two volumes which he is editing. One is a cultural history of treason and treason discourses from the antiquity to the present (Verräter. Kulturgeschichte eines Deutungsmusters, Cologne (Böhlau) 2017), and the other is a collection of essays on assassinations and conspiracies as political crimes, ca. 1400-1900 (forthcoming with Constance University Press in 2017).
A public lecture by Professor Dr Michael Butter (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen)
Abstract
While conspiracy theories constituted legitimate knowledge in the United States in the past, they have lost this status in the present. Yet, they still possess commonsensical appeal. The continuing attraction of their stigmatized knowledge is nowhere more powerfully dramatized than in the novels of Dan Brown, which all evoke large-scale conspiracies that then turn out not to be true at all. At the same time, conspiracy theorizing might be changing its status again, as the successes of Donald Trump, who has embraced various conspiracy theories, during the Republican primaries suggest.
Michael Butter is Professor of American Studies at the University of Tübingen. He is the author of Plots, Designs, and Schemes: American Conspiracy Theory from the Puritans to Present (2014) and has written various essays on different aspects of conspiracy theory. He also was the main proposer of the COST Action “Comparative Analysis of Conspiracy Theories” which brings together scholars from more than thirty countries and a dozen disciplines to explore European conspiracy theories for the next four years.
This event is open to all and will be followed by a wine reception.
This is part of a series of public talks from the Leverhulme-funded project Conspiracy and Democracy. More information at http://www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org/
A public lecture by Rob Brotherton (Barnard College, Columbia University)
Abstract
Why do people believe conspiracy theories? What’s the harm if they do? And just what is a conspiracy theory, anyway? Conspiracy theories captured the attention of philosophers and historians decades ago, but it is only within the last few years that psychologists have begun gathering data on these kinds of questions. In this talk, Rob Brotherton provides a psychological perspective on conspiracism, drawing on his own research as well as other insights explored in his new book Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories. In particular, research into cognitive biases and heuristics – quirks in the way our brains are wired – suggests that we’re all intuitive conspiracy theorists; some of us just hide it better than others.
Rob Brotherton is an academic psychologist and science writer. He completed a PhD on the psychology of conspiracy theories with the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2013. Rob lectured at Goldsmiths for a year before moving to New York City, where he now teaches classes on conspiracy theories and science communication, as well as other aspects of psychology, at Barnard College, Columbia University. Rob's book on the psychology of conspiracy theories, Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories, was published by Bloomsbury in 2015.
This event is open to all and will be followed by a wine reception.
This is part of a series of public talks from the Leverhulme-funded project Conspiracy and Democracy. More information at http://www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org/
Conspiracy and Terror in the French Revolution - A public lecture by Marisa Linton (Kingston University)
Abstract
Conspiracies, both real and imagined, played a central role in the shifting dynamics of French revolutionary politics. This talk will look at how fear of conspiracy influenced decisions taken by revolutionary leaders during the most traumatic period of the Revolution - the Terror of the Year II (1793-94). Successive revolutionary factions were subject to a specific form of terror, the ‘politicians’ terror’, whereby they themselves were denounced as ‘the enemy within’ and put to death. This talk will examine the ideological, tactical and emotional factors that led some of the Revolution’s most prominent leaders, including Brissot, Danton, and Robespierre, to be condemned as secret conspirators against it.
Biography
Marisa Linton is currently Reader in History at Kingston University. She has written extensively on the political culture of the French Revolution and the French Enlightenment. She is the author of Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship and Authenticity in the French Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2013), a study of the political leaders of the French Revolution and the process whereby they came to ‘choose terror’. She is also the author of The Politics of Virtue in Enlightenment France (Palgrave, 2001), which examines how the Enlightenment concept of political virtue became an integral part of the language of revolutionary politics. She is the co-editor of Conspiracy in the French Revolution (Manchester University Press, 2007). Her other publications have addressed such subjects as: Robespierre’s political ideology; the concept of the political hero in French revolutionary politics; the intellectual origins of the French Revolution; and religious toleration in eighteenth-century France. She frequently writes for popular publications, such as History Today and BBC History, and has made several television and radio appearances. She is currently working on a further book for Oxford University Press, a study of four Jacobin leaders, Robespierre, Danton, Desmoulins and Saint-Just, to be entitled Saturn’s Children: Leaders of the French Revolution.
Enlightenment and Conspiracy - A Public lecture by Darrin McMahon (Dartmouth College, USA)
In this talk McMahon will address the role of conspiracy and conspiratorial thinking in the intellectual culture of the long 18th century.
Darrin M. McMahon is the Mary Brinsmead Wheelock professor at Dartmouth College, and formerly the Ben Weider Professor and Distinguished Research Professor at Florida State University. Born in Carmel, California, and educated at the University of California, Berkeley and Yale, where he received his PhD in 1998, McMahon is the author of Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2001) and Happiness: A History (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006), which has been translated into twelve languages, and was awarded Best Books of the Year honors for 2006 by the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Library Journal, and Slate Magazine. In 2013, McMahon completed a history of the idea of genius and the genius figure, Divine Fury: A History of Genius, published with Basic Books. He is also the editor, with Ryan Hanley, of The Enlightenment: Critical Concepts in Historical Studies, 5 vols. (Routledge, 2009); with Samuel Moyn, of Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History (Oxford University Press, 2014); and with Joyce Chaplin of Genealogies of Genius (Palgrave, 2015). McMahon has taught as a visiting scholar at Columbia University, New York University, Yale University, the University of Rouen, the École Normale Supérieur, École des Hautes Études, and the University of Potsdam. His writings have appeared frequently in such publications as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, New York Times Book Review, Slate, Washington Post, The New Republic, and the Literary Review.
The Real Ideology of Putin's Russia: how it's used in foreign policy and what to do about it
Peter Pomerantsev
Author of "Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia" - Shortlisted for the Guardian First Book award, Long listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize, Shortlisted for the Pushkin House Price and Gorden Burns Prizes).
Open to all. No registration required.
This event will be followed by a wine reception.
This is part of a series of public talks from the Leverhulme-funded project Conspiracy and Democracy. More information at http://www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org
The assassination of Alvaro Obregón: jury trials and the problem of truth in post revolutionary Mexico
A public lecture by Professor Pablo A. Piccato (Columbia University).
Abstract
When José de León Toral killed president elect Álvaro Obregón in July 1928, president Plutarco Elías Calles decided that the case would be tried in a penal court, to show the world the impartiality of the Mexican justice system. In the middle of a growing religious conflict, Calles wanted to avoid the demonstrations of Catholic popular support that followed the extrajudicial execution of other would-be assassins the year before. The jury trial against León Toral and his alleged accomplice, Concepción Acevedo, became an unprecedented media event, however, in which multiple conspiracy theories about the death of Obregón and the justice of tyrannicide were discussed in national radio broadcast, and fully transcribed in the newspapers. The case contributed to the elimination of jury trials in Mexico City and opened an era of popular skepticism toward the judicial system in general.
Pablo Piccato, professor, specializes in Mexican history. He has worked on the political and cultural history of Mexico, and on the history of crime. He is currently working on an overview of crime in Mexico during the twentieth century.
This event will be followed by a wine reception.
This is part of a series of public talks from the Leverhulme-funded project Conspiracy and Democracy. More information at http://www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org.
Conspiracy and the beginning of the democratic state in Britain 1830 - 1860
A public lecture by Professor David Vincent (Emeritus Professor in History, Open University).
Abstract:
The lecture will examine the nature of conspiracy in the years immediately following the Great Reform Act of 1832, which laid the foundation for the development of a democratic state in Britain. Its broad question will be the extent to which the new polity was accompanied by a transformation in the way in which conspiracy was conceived and communicated. It will reassess the career of the diplomat and journalist David Urquhart, who accused successive politicians, particularly Lord Palmerston, of treasonable conduct in the 1830s and 1840s in the realm of international relations. And it will examine the postal espionage crisis of 1844 and the public controversy over surveillance and official secrecy. It will deploy a range of literary and visual evidence to consider issues including the function of mass communication in generating and facilitating conspiracy theories; the shift in focus from individuals to systems as the locus of conspiracy; the changing language of conspiracy and the decline of the caricature sensibility in the democratic discourse; the professionalisation of administration and the management of official information; the role of Jeremy Bentham, honorary godfather to Urquhart and theorist of the new democratic order.
Imitation Games: Conspiratorial Sciences and Intelligent Machines
A public lecture by Professor Simon Schaffer (University of Cambridge)
Please note the later start time of 5.30pm for this lecture.
Abstract
Influential public declarations about the normative system of the sciences produced in the mid-twentieth century by authorities such as J D Bernal ('The social function of science', 1939) and R K Merton ('Science and technology in a democratic order', 1942) urged the fundamental contrast between science and secrecy: what Merton significantly labeled 'communism' meant that scientists must and did publicise and share their work as widely as possible. A decade later, at a key conjuncture of the Cold War, inquiries in fields such as computation (Alan Turing 'Computing machinery and intelligence', 1950) and psychological politics (Edward Hunter, 'Brainwashing', 1950) described the opposite phenomenon: the importance of sequestered and secretive knowledge in scientific understanding and management of human intelligence. The relations between these normative systems and their role in public culture were important themes in the emergence of the imageries of science and secrecy in the mid-twentieth century.
Professor Simon Schaffer is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, and has been a Fellow of Darwin College since 1985. Until recently he was editor of The British Journal for the History of Science. His research interests include the history of physical science and the social history of science. In July 2012 he was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy.
Professor Schaffer was jointly awarded the Erasmus Prize in 2005 for the book Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life, which he co-authored with Steven Shapin. In 2004, he presented a series of documentaries for the BBC about light and the history of its study and knowledge.
Suspect Science: Climate Change, Epidemics, and Questions of Conspiracy
17 - 19 September 2015
Convenors
Dr Nayanika Mathur and Dr Alfred Moore, Research Fellows on the Conspiracy and Democracy project.
Summary
In recent years conspiracy theories have come to be seen as a threat to democracy. They have been variously linked to a crisis of trust in government, to the undermining of democratic deliberation, and a weakening the state's capacity to govern. Particular concern has focused on conspiratorial suspicion of science, in cases ranging from climate change to HIV-AIDS to vaccines and public health surveillance more generally.
Where science, politics and power intersect we find rich ground for suspicion and mistrust of experts, and accusations of conspiracy. This raises a number of important questions. Why do people believe in conspiracy theories? How do people think about conspiracies? How are we to make sense of the relationship between mistrust of expertise and accusations of conspiracy? How have boundaries been drawn between authorized and unauthorized knowledge? How are anxieties about conspiracies related to more general problems of explanation and causal attribution in complex environments?
In this conference we aim to situate these questions about 'suspect science' in broader conceptual, geographical and historical contexts. We will address them by drawing together scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, public health, history, politics, sociology, psychology, and philosophy, and we will consider a wide range of empirical cases. Through this interdisciplinary approach we hope to stimulate critical reflection on the shifting problems of doubt, denial and dissent in the politics of knowledge.
Keynote speakers:
David Runciman, University of Cambridge
Eric Oliver, University of Chicago
Harriet Washington, University of Las Vegas, Nevada
Suspect Science: Climate Change, Epidemics, and Questions of Conspiracy
17 - 19 September 2015
Convenors
Dr Nayanika Mathur and Dr Alfred Moore, Research Fellows on the Conspiracy and Democracy project.
Summary
In recent years conspiracy theories have come to be seen as a threat to democracy. They have been variously linked to a crisis of trust in government, to the undermining of democratic deliberation, and a weakening the state's capacity to govern. Particular concern has focused on conspiratorial suspicion of science, in cases ranging from climate change to HIV-AIDS to vaccines and public health surveillance more generally.
Where science, politics and power intersect we find rich ground for suspicion and mistrust of experts, and accusations of conspiracy. This raises a number of important questions. Why do people believe in conspiracy theories? How do people think about conspiracies? How are we to make sense of the relationship between mistrust of expertise and accusations of conspiracy? How have boundaries been drawn between authorized and unauthorized knowledge? How are anxieties about conspiracies related to more general problems of explanation and causal attribution in complex environments?
In this conference we aim to situate these questions about 'suspect science' in broader conceptual, geographical and historical contexts. We will address them by drawing together scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, public health, history, politics, sociology, psychology, and philosophy, and we will consider a wide range of empirical cases. Through this interdisciplinary approach we hope to stimulate critical reflection on the shifting problems of doubt, denial and dissent in the politics of knowledge.
Keynote speakers:
David Runciman, University of Cambridge
Eric Oliver, University of Chicago
Harriet Washington, University of Las Vegas, Nevada
Suspect Science: Climate Change, Epidemics, and Questions of Conspiracy
17 - 19 September 2015
Convenors
Dr Nayanika Mathur and Dr Alfred Moore, Research Fellows on the Conspiracy and Democracy project.
Summary
In recent years conspiracy theories have come to be seen as a threat to democracy. They have been variously linked to a crisis of trust in government, to the undermining of democratic deliberation, and a weakening the state's capacity to govern. Particular concern has focused on conspiratorial suspicion of science, in cases ranging from climate change to HIV-AIDS to vaccines and public health surveillance more generally.
Where science, politics and power intersect we find rich ground for suspicion and mistrust of experts, and accusations of conspiracy. This raises a number of important questions. Why do people believe in conspiracy theories? How do people think about conspiracies? How are we to make sense of the relationship between mistrust of expertise and accusations of conspiracy? How have boundaries been drawn between authorized and unauthorized knowledge? How are anxieties about conspiracies related to more general problems of explanation and causal attribution in complex environments?
In this conference we aim to situate these questions about 'suspect science' in broader conceptual, geographical and historical contexts. We will address them by drawing together scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, public health, history, politics, sociology, psychology, and philosophy, and we will consider a wide range of empirical cases. Through this interdisciplinary approach we hope to stimulate critical reflection on the shifting problems of doubt, denial and dissent in the politics of knowledge.
Keynote speakers:
David Runciman, University of Cambridge
Eric Oliver, University of Chicago
Harriet Washington, University of Las Vegas, Nevada
Technological conspiracies are good conspiracies - at least from the perspective of their proponents. Understanding their dynamics, especially within the context of liberalism, may help shed light upon an apparent puzzle of twenty-first century living: why, when individual privacy is being systematically undermined by both governments and corporations, so few people seem to care. The answer, I suggest, has much to do with rapidly changing conceptions of self and society, but also a prior, fundamental commitment to imagining both self and society as quantifiable and controllable. Leading liberal theorists today tend to see the digital challenge to privacy as undermining one of the core commitments of liberalism. However, I wish to suggest that our current predicament is the result of liberalism's internal logic , a political theory that formally eschews conspiracy thinking in favour of science and modernity, yet one that manages to employ theories of good conspiracy, nonetheless. Technological conspiracies are the fulfilment of a modern, liberal dream, bringing together political power and technology so that citizens are fully known to their governments and corporations such that older concerns with privacy simply become irrelevant.
A public lecture by Professor Lawrence Quill (San Jose).
n 2003 Jenny Clay Strauss, daughter of the German Jewish historian of political philosophy Leo Strauss and herself a professor of classics, wrote to the New York Times to protest articles that presented her father “as the mastermind behind the neoconservative ideologues who control United States foreign policy.” She went on: “He reaches out from his 30-year-old grave, we are told, to direct a "cabal" (a word with distinct anti-Semitic overtones) of Bush administration figures hoping to subject the American people to rule by a ruthless elite.” In “A Cabal We Deserve: Leo Strauss, the Straussians, and Public Intellectual Culture,” Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft explores the meanings of conspiracy theories surrounding Leo Strauss and the Straussians. What values of transparency in democratic governance, what attitudes towards lying in politics, animate them? What ideas about conservative as opposed to progressive intellectuals? And what expectations for public intellectual life in a democratic society are bound up with all this talk of conspiracy?
The ‘Judeo-Masonic-Bolshevik’ Conspiracy in the Spanish Second Republic, 1931-1936
Christopher Bannister (European University Institute)
Abstract
The establishment of the Second Republic on 14 April 1931 caused convulsions across the Right in Spain. In little over a year, the dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera had fallen and soon after the Borbón royal family, rulers of Spain for over two hundred years, followed suit. If the replacement of a monarchical military regime with a democratic republic was not a brutal transition enough, the form the Second Republic took was of great distress to the forces of reaction. With its establishment of universal suffrage, commitment to land reform and intent to curb the political influence of the Catholic Church and the Army, the Republic represented, for many on the Right in Spain, an abomination, a betrayal of national values. The proposed research project will focus upon a particular assertion within certain strands of the Spanish Right-Wing media that the Republic was, in fact, not of Spanish origin at all, but instead subject to the diktats of a cabal of ‘Masons, Communists and Jews’.[1] The belief being that its origins and subsequent progressive, leftist agenda, so foreign to the reactionary understanding of ‘Spanish’ values, must have been the work of foreign agents.
This lecture will examine the concept of the ‘Judeo-Masonic-Bolshevik’ Conspiracy during the Spanish Second Republic, to understand its influence in fostering anti-Republican feeling prior to the outbreak of war and to ultimately assess its contribution to Francoist repression during the dictatorship (1939-1975), all within a broader European context. In the fraught atmosphere of the Civil War proper, the apparently outlandish assertion that the Republic was being run by the ‘International Jewry’ from Moscow via Europe’s Masonic lodges became a key theme in Francoist propaganda, one that would continue long into the posguerra. The lecture will examine the roots of this discourse, detailing the confluence of more traditionally ‘Spanish’ anti-Semitic attitudes and the broader European conception of an international ‘Judeo-Marxist’ Conspiracy.
An open lecture with Nicci Gerrard and Sean French (writers).
'Story-telling is how we make sense of the world - especially the bits we don't understand' Two leading writers talk about how this surfaces in - and influences - their work. Join the Conspiracy and Democracy Project as we host Nicci Gerard and Sean French - collectively Nicci French - for a talk and discussion.
A public lecture by Dr Turkay Nefes (Oxford).
This is part of a series of public talks from the Leverhulme-funded project Conspiracy and Democracy. More information at http://www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org
Summary
What happens when a prime minister proposes conspiratorial accounts of a momentous event in a democracy? Although conspiratorial rhetoric is the backbone of ideologies of social intolerance and hatred, such as anti-Semitism, the academic literature does not comprehensively address its impacts. The Turkish government’s reaction to the Gezi Park protests, a reaction centred on a conspiracy theory about an ‘interest rate lobby’, provides an up-to-date case with which to explore the impacts of conspiracy theories. Relying on quantitative and qualitative content analysis of responses to the government’s conspiracy theories on the most popular Turkish forum website, Ekşi Sözlük, this study discusses the socio-political significance of conspiratorial rhetoric. It focuses on the relationship between the previous political views of online users and their responses to the conspiratorial rhetoric. The study proposes that there is a relationship between online users’ previous political orientations and their perceptions of the conspiracy theory concerning the Gezi Park protests. The findings support this premise: (1) binary logistic regression tests show that the previous political views of online users predict their responses to conspiracy theories, and (2) the online users’ comments were centred on their perceptions of the government. The study concludes that people accept or reject conspiracy theories in line with their political values and interests, and, accordingly, that the government’s rhetoric concerning the protests augmented the political fragmentation in Turkey by enhancing the existing division between AKP supporters and opponents.
A public talk from Dr Andy Martin (Cambridge).
In 1940s New York, FBI alarm bells are ringing: the Existentialists are coming! J. Edgar Hoover has to know: what the hell is this Existentialism all about anyway – and is it some kind of code for Communism? He sets his agents on the trail of first Jean-Paul Sartre (1945) and then Albert Camus (1946). Sartre and Camus, Resistance heroes and intellectual emissaries, are sending back their reports about New York to Paris; and, at the same time, G-men are sending in their reports about Sartre and Camus. Through their reading of French philosophy, the FBI and CIA develop contrasting approaches to the concept of conspiracy.
A public talk by Dr Michael Hagemeister (Ruhr-Universität Bochum).
Investigations into the origin and early history of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” often lead to the border between fiction (or mystification) and historical fact. Furthermore, one can observe how this border is crossed: the “Protocols” were compiled from a series of fictional texts and then presented as the authentic document of an actual conspiracy. However, the (scientific) literature about the “Protocols” also far too frequently ignores this border, when, for example, coherent and therefore convincing stories take precedence over well-researched histories. In this paper I shall present some results of my research on the “Protocols”. A close reading of the early Russian versions shows that the “Protocols” is an “open text” of undefined genre which can be (and has been) perceived not only as a document but also as a fictional text, a negative utopia depicting a future global, totalitarian welfare state. This was overlaid with an apocalyptical reading of the “Protocols” which was introduced by Sergei Nilus, the most prominent editor and commentator of this text. The excited response to the “Protocols” since the early 1920s called for a prompt investigation into its origin and the channels through which it had been disseminated. Thereupon a detailed and coherent narrative was created and later authorized by a legal court. This narrative is, in itself, a conspiracy story, a dubious construction based on equally dubious witnesses. Thus the response to the myth of the Jewish conspiracy has been a counter-myth, which is no less mysterious than the one it aims to oppose.
This is a public lecture by James Roslington (Cambridge).
This is part of a series of public talks from the Leverhulme-funded project Conspiracy and Democracy. More information at http://www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org
Dr Alex Beringer (Montevallo) will present a public leacture.
This talk will explore Mark Twain’s perspective on conspiracy theory in late-nineteenth century America. In Twain’s time, public attitudes towards conspiracy theory went through a somewhat unusual change. Namely, conspiracy theory was becoming increasingly identified with amusement and entertainment. Figures such as Josiah Strong and Ignatius Donnelly drew enormous crowds and sold bestselling books by offering conspiratorial interpretations of history that bore a closer resemblance to P.T. Barnum’s promotions than to conventional political rhetoric.
For his part, Twain was ambivalent about these developments. On the one hand, he expressed appreciation for the “solid satisfaction” to be had from a good conspiratorial mystery. Twain even penned a conspiracy theory history on Shakespeare where he commented on his enthusiasm for what he termed the “conjecturability” associated with conspiracy. On the other, Twain also regarded the public’s amusement with conspiracy thinking as a disturbing trend. If historical events were only considered interesting when they provided a thrilling mystery or visceral head rush, this encouraged people to drift towards political insularity and extremism. In tracing these currents in Twain’s thought, the discussion will delve into widely-known works by Twain like Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court as well as lesser-known pieces such as the unfinished novel Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy.
Stolen Votes, Secret spooks and the hidden oil: Conspiracy theories in an age of transparency
A public talk by the journalist and broadcaster David Aaronovitch (The Times).
"Is Democracy Conspiratorial?: Koselleck, Furet, and the Debate on the French Revolution"
Conspiracy and Democracy, a Leverhulme-funded research project. More information is available at www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org.
Since the time of the abbé Barruel, the French Revolution - the source of democratic claims eventually the world over - has been unmasked as the outcome of a dark conspiracy. This talk will examine some of the contemporary legacies of this claim about the secret agenda of democratic self-rule, with a focus on some famous main twentieth-century commentators like Reinhart Koselleck and François Furet who were insufficiently critical of the old allegation even in renovating our sense of where the Revolution fits in modern politics. Dwelling on some of the intellectual origins of Furet's "Interpreting the French Revolution," in which the conspiracy claim figured, the talk will distinguish that strand of the book from other and more valuable impulses, which had other sources, notably the view that democracy is the rule of no one, so that it is very hard to justify or even securely locate its legitimate authorities at any given time.
Samuel Moyn is James Bryce Professor of European Legal History at Columbia University, where he has been teaching since 2001. He is author of "The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History" (2010) and a new collection of essays entitled "Human Rights and the Uses of History" (2014). From July 1, 2014, he will take up a new position as professor of law and history at Harvard University.
"Is Democracy Conspiratorial?: Koselleck, Furet, and the Debate on the French Revolution"
Since the time of the abbé Barruel, the French Revolution - the source of democratic claims eventually the world over - has been unmasked as the outcome of a dark conspiracy. This talk will examine some of the contemporary legacies of this claim about the secret agenda of democratic self-rule, with a focus on some famous main twentieth-century commentators like Reinhart Koselleck and François Furet who were insufficiently critical of the old allegation even in renovating our sense of where the Revolution fits in modern politics. Dwelling on some of the intellectual origins of Furet's "Interpreting the French Revolution," in which the conspiracy claim figured, the talk will distinguish that strand of the book from other and more valuable impulses, which had other sources, notably the view that democracy is the rule of no one, so that it is very hard to justify or even securely locate its legitimate authorities at any given time.
The event will be followed by a wine reception.
Samuel Moyn is James Bryce Professor of European Legal History at Columbia University, where he has been teaching since 2001. He is author of "The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History" (2010) and a new collection of essays entitled "Human Rights and the Uses of History" (2014). From July 1, 2014, he will take up a new position as professor of law and history at Harvard University.
Conspiracy and Democracy, a Leverhulme-funded research project. More information is available at www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org.
This paper examines British and American anticommunist conspiracy theories in the 1920s and 1930s. In both countries, former wartime intelligence agency chiefs set up private intelligence networks in the post-World War I era to spy upon and blacklist radicals -- and, not incidentally, to monitor and control labour union leaders. Also in both countries, businessmen created and lavishly funded anticommunist propaganda organizations. The propagandists in each country exploited quite different anxieties, yet they shared the same goal: to use the fear of communism as a weapon in the struggle against organized labour.
Kathy Olmsted is professor and chair of history at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI; Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley; and Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11.
A public talk by Professor Joseph Parent (University of Miami) & Professor Joseph Uscinski (University of Miami).
Conspiracy and Democracy, a Leverhulme-funded research project. More information is available at www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org.
Are conspiracy theories overtaking deliberative societies, inflaming discourse and degrading democracy? How much more prone to violence are conspiracy theorists? Which political party is more likely to traffic in conspiratorial talk? Has the Internet ushered in a new era of conspiracy-fueled paranoia? Using original data sources spanning more than a century, Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent provide surprising answers. In taking stock of American conspiracy theories, Uscinski and Parent argue that much of what we thought we knew about conspiracy theories needs amending.
Joseph E. Uscinski is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Miami. He earned his Ph.D. in American Politics at the University of Arizona. Professor Uscinski teaches and studies mass media, public opinion, and campaigns.
Joseph M. Parent is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Miami. He received his bachelors from the University of Chicago and doctorate from Columbia University. Professor Parent teaches international relations theory, foreign policy, and security studies.
A public talk by Professor Joseph Parent (University of Miami) & Professor Joseph Uscinski (University of Miami).
Are conspiracy theories overtaking deliberative societies, inflaming discourse and degrading democracy? How much more prone to violence are conspiracy theorists? Which political party is more likely to traffic in conspiratorial talk? Has the Internet ushered in a new era of conspiracy-fueled paranoia? Using original data sources spanning more than a century, Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent provide surprising answers. In taking stock of American conspiracy theories, Uscinski and Parent argue that much of what we thought we knew about conspiracy theories needs amending.
Joseph E. Uscinski is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Miami. He earned his Ph.D. in American Politics at the University of Arizona. Professor Uscinski teaches and studies mass media, public opinion, and campaigns.
Joseph M. Parent is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Miami. He received his bachelors from the University of Chicago and doctorate from Columbia University. Professor Parent teaches international relations theory, foreign policy, and security studies.
This paper examines British and American anticommunist conspiracy theories in the 1920s and 1930s. In both countries, former wartime intelligence agency chiefs set up private intelligence networks in the post-World War I era to spy upon and blacklist radicals -- and, not incidentally, to monitor and control labour union leaders. Also in both countries, businessmen created and lavishly funded anticommunist propaganda organizations. The propagandists in each country exploited quite different anxieties, yet they shared the same goal: to use the fear of communism as a weapon in the struggle against organized labour.
Kathy Olmsted is professor and chair of history at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI; Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley; and Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11.
Conspiracy and Democracy, a Leverhulme-funded research project. More information is available at www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org.
In the social sciences, a conspiracy theory is often disqualified as ‘irrational’ superstition or religious belief. In defense, conspiracy theorists present their methods of inquiry as utterly rational – often even more scientific than ‘dogmatic’ institutionalized science. In this lecture, it is argued that both definitions of conspiracy theories are inadequate: they are basically moral labels and informed by a power struggle over ‘true’ knowledge. At closer empirical inspection, conspiracy theorists combine aspects of science and religion to find the ‘truth out there’. On the one hand, they embrace modern skepticism about contemporary institutions, experts and the knowledge they produce. On the other, they are motivated by a desire to believe in a progressively ‘disenchanted world’: by making claims about invisible, yet powerful forces operating beyond the empirical surface of everyday life, they attribute ultimate meaning to a modern, rationalized and globalized society. Conspiracy culture is a complex constellation of skepticism and belief – a rational form of re-enchantment.
Conspiracy and Democracy, a Leverhulme-funded research project. More information is available at www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org.
Professor Deborah E. Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, will speak about ‘Holocaust Denial: A Flat Earth Theory or a Clear and Present Danger?’
Holocaust denial, the attempt to deny that the Third Reich engaged in the annihilation of approximately six million Jews, has been depicted as a serious threat to historical truth. Others have dismissed it as the equivalent of the theory that the earth is flat, i.e. absurd, illogical, and unworthy of serious consideration. In this presentation Professor Lipstadt will explore these two contradictory perspectives on Holocaust denial. In addition, she will explore the difference between “hardcore” or traditional Holocaust denial and the more recent phenomenon of “soft core” denial.
Conspiracy and Democracy, a Leverhulme-funded research project. More information is available at www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org.
Professor Cornel Zwierlein (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) will speak about “Knowledge Gaps: The Early Modern Foundations of Conspiracy & Democracy”.
It seems as if Conspiracy Theories are a particularly modern phenomenon. By relying on some examples and cases, this lecture gives a long-term overview of what they looked like and when they appeared. We possess full-fledged conspiracy theory texts only since the 16th century. While examples may have existed already in Antiquity, we do not possess any textual evidence for them. The lecture tries to develop an explanation for why conspiracy theories emerged only at this point in European history. In order to do so, it is necessary to distinguish between conjurations, any kind of revolts, conspiracies and conspiracy theories. We will show how their coming into being is linked to the emergence of the ‘Information Public Sphere’, as a by-product of the early inter-state diplomatic communication (which has, first, little to do with the later famous ‘Enlightenment Public Sphere’), and how those narratives filled in where knowledge gaps existed. In a hasty run through history, we will distinguish several phases or ‘epochs’ of Conspiracy (theory) communication. Finally, we will ask how Democracy comes in: ‘Real’ democracies were practiced rather nowhere after Ancient Europe, and were rare even during the 19th century. So, in pre-modern times, often it was ‘democracy’ or ‘democrats’ that were ‘conspiring’ against the good order of the commonwealth – not vice versa.
Cornel Zwierlein is Associate Professor at the University of Bochum, Germany. Currently, he is on leave as a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University. His research focuses on the intersection of political, religious and scientific knowledge. Cornel is the author of ‘Discorso und Lex Dei die Entstehung neuer Denkrahmen im 16. Jahrhundert und die Wahrnehmung der französischen Religionskriege in Italien und Deutschland’ (Göttingen, 2006), and, more recently, ‘Der gezähmte Prometheus. Feuer und Sicherheit zwischen Früher Neuzeit und Moderne’ (Göttingen, 2011).
Conspiracy and Democracy, a Leverhulme-funded research project. More information is available at www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org.
Mr Smith’s paper will explore how the idea of the mafia and conspiracy emerged in America, developed and became entangled in very different contexts.
Mr Smith will describe the ideas, experiences, and events through which his book, ‘The Mafia Mystique’ (1975), took shape; the consequences of those events that have led to contemporary public understanding and use of ‘Mafia’ in the United States; and the consequences in a democracy of strategies that were developed for organized crime control.
Conspiracy and Democracy, a Leverhulme-funded research project. More information is available at www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org.
Dr Girard will describe how the “red scare” greatly varied depending on the period, the political affiliation or the country; and the main long-lasting conspiracy theory actually concerned the threat of the far-right and, to a certain extent, of the government itself.
Arguments about climate change are rife with conspiracy theories. There are those who think the whole thing is a giant hoax: a scam cooked up by environmentalists and left-wing scientists to empower governments and rip off consumers. But there are equivalent suspicions on the other side: a belief that the sceptics and denialists are just the front for an oil industry-funded plot to bamboozle voters and keep the fossil fuels flowing. The prevalence of these kinds of conspiracy theories is one reason why the debate has become so fractious and polarised. This talk will explore why the climate debate seems so susceptible to conspiracy theories and what that tells us about the current state of mistrust in democracy: mistrust of experts, mistrusts of corporations, mistrust of government itself. Why on an issue like this – of such enormous importance – do we find it so hard to believe what we are told?
Please join the Leverhulme-funded Conspiracy & Democracy research project on Tuesday 13th May at 5pm at the Roger Needham Room, Wolfson College when Dr Pascal Girard (Reims) will speak about ‘Conspiracy Theories in France and Italy during the Cold War and Decolonization’. Dr Girard’s paper will explore how in the late forties and in the fifties, conspiracy was a significant concern in French and Italian politics.
Dr Girard will describe how the “red scare” greatly varied depending on the period, the political affiliation or the country; and the main long-lasting conspiracy theory actually concerned the threat of the far-right and, to a certain extent, of the government itself.
Please join the Leverhulme-funded Conspiracy & Democracy research project on Tuesday, 29th April at 5pm at the Alison Richard Building (Sidgwick Site) when Mr Dwight Smith Jr will speak about ‘The Mafia & Conspiracy’. Mr Smith’s paper will explore how the idea of the mafia and conspiracy emerged in America, developed and became entangled in very different contexts.
Mr Smith will describe the ideas, experiences, and events through which his book, ‘The Mafia Mystique’ (1975), took shape; the consequences of those events that have led to contemporary public understanding and use of ‘Mafia’ in the United States; and the consequences in a democracy of strategies that were developed for organized crime control.
Please join the Leverhulme-funded Conspiracy & Democracy research project when Professor Deborah E. Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, will speak about ‘Holocaust Denial: A Flat Earth Theory or a Clear and Present Danger?’
Holocaust denial, the attempt to deny that the Third Reich engaged in the annihilation of approximately six million Jews, has been depicted as a serious threat to historical truth. Others have dismissed it as the equivalent of the theory that the earth is flat, i.e. absurd, illogical, and unworthy of serious consideration. In this presentation Professor Lipstadt will explore these two contradictory perspectives on Holocaust denial. In addition, she will explore the difference between “hardcore” or traditional Holocaust denial and the more recent phenomenon of “soft core” denial.
A Public Lecture by Conspiracy & Democracy Visiting Fellow Professor Cornel Zwierlein (Ruhr-Universität Bochum).
Please join the Leverhulme-funded Conspiracy & Democracy research project on Tuesday, 28 January at 5pm at the Alison Richard Building (Sidgwick Site) when Professor Cornel Zwierlein (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) will speak about “Knowledge Gaps: The Early Modern Foundations of Conspiracy & Democracy”.
It seems as if Conspiracy Theories are a particularly modern phenomenon. By relying on some examples and cases, this lecture gives a long-term overview of what they looked like and when they appeared. We possess full-fledged conspiracy theory texts only since the 16th century. While examples may have existed already in Antiquity, we do not possess any textual evidence for them. The lecture tries to develop an explanation for why conspiracy theories emerged only at this point in European history. In order to do so, it is necessary to distinguish between conjurations, any kind of revolts, conspiracies and conspiracy theories. We will show how their coming into being is linked to the emergence of the ‘Information Public Sphere’, as a by-product of the early inter-state diplomatic communication (which has, first, little to do with the later famous ‘Enlightenment Public Sphere’), and how those narratives filled in where knowledge gaps existed. In a hasty run through history, we will distinguish several phases or ‘epochs’ of Conspiracy (theory) communication. Finally, we will ask how Democracy comes in: ‘Real’ democracies were practiced rather nowhere after Ancient Europe, and were rare even during the 19th century. So, in pre-modern times, often it was ‘democracy’ or ‘democrats’ that were ‘conspiring’ against the good order of the commonwealth – not vice versa.
Cornel Zwierlein is Associate Professor at the University of Bochum, Germany. Currently, he is on leave as a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University. His research focuses on the intersection of political, religious and scientific knowledge. Cornel is the author of ‘Discorso und Lex Dei die Entstehung neuer Denkrahmen im 16. Jahrhundert und die Wahrnehmung der französischen Religionskriege in Italien und Deutschland’ (Göttingen, 2006), and, more recently, ‘Der gezähmte Prometheus. Feuer und Sicherheit zwischen Früher Neuzeit und Moderne’ (Göttingen, 2011).
A Public Lecture by Conspiracy & Democracy Visiting Fellow Stef Aupers (Erasmus University of Rotterdam).
In the social sciences, a conspiracy theory is often disqualified as ‘irrational’ superstition or religious belief. In defense, conspiracy theorists present their methods of inquiry as utterly rational – often even more scientific than ‘dogmatic’ institutionalized science. In this lecture, it is argued that both definitions of conspiracy theories are inadequate: they are basically moral labels and informed by a power struggle over ‘true’ knowledge. At closer empirical inspection, conspiracy theorists combine aspects of science and religion to find the ‘truth out there’. On the one hand, they embrace modern skepticism about contemporary institutions, experts and the knowledge they produce. On the other, they are motivated by a desire to believe in a progressively ‘disenchanted world’: by making claims about invisible, yet powerful forces operating beyond the empirical surface of everyday life, they attribute ultimate meaning to a modern, rationalized and globalized society. Conspiracy culture is a complex constellation of skepticism and belief – a rational form of re-enchantment.
Jonathan Haslam, Professor of the History of International Relations The history of Russia’s Secret Services from the Revolution to the Fall of the Wall: the Military Intelligence, the codes and ciphers and the KGB.
How do conspiracies happen, how can historians use them to understand more about the past, and where do they begin and cease to be relevant to the study of history? Such questions were the starting point for this panel debate, in which Professor Christopher Andrew and Dr Stephen Dorril examine cases from Stalinist Russia, Harold Wilson’s government in the 1960s, and Northern Ireland in the 1970s, to name but a few. - See more at: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/features/history-and-conspiracy#sthash.UnAMoebB.dpuf