In fact, a frequent claim prevalent in the scholarship identifies the eighteenth century as the century that gave birth to conspiracy theory, or conspiracism, in a form that is recognisable to us today [Wood, G.S. (1982) ‘Conspiracy and the paranoid style: causality and deceit in the eighteenth century’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 39: 401-41; Pipes, D. (1997) Conspiracy: how the paranoid style flourishes and where it comes from, New York: Free Press; Butter, M. (2014) Plots, designs, and schemes: American conspiracy theories from the Puritans to the present, Berlin: de Gruyter].
– ‘Conspiracy theorising and the history of media in the eighteenth century’, in Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories (2020), p. 401
This chapter has, however, identified a number of aspects of print culture that add potency to conspiracy theorising within this medial context. Reviewing them in the reverse order to which they were presented, print culture offers scope for anonymous communication. This anonymity has in turn a proximity to both public opinion (as the opinion not of a specific, identifiable person, but rather of a collective) and secrecy, and this melange can suggest an occult control over how and what is communicated in society and ultimately an occult control over society itself. If heightened scope for anonymity is a quality inherent to print, the contrast effects discussed in this chapter arise as a result of its difference to older media. Such differences can bestow upon both face-to-face, oral interaction and written correspondence elements of secrecy. Finally, given [Cornel] Zwierlein’s characterisation of conspiracy theories as occupying a no – man’s land between fact and fiction, a fuller exploration of how this distinction is modulated and modified within print culture could be expected to yield highly relevant insights.
– Ibid., p. 411