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Many scholars have drawn on this argument and have suggested that, ironically, exactly at the time when [in his essay ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’, Richard] Hofstadter was making this claim, conspiracy theories were…
Read more of Michael Butter on the stigmatization of conspiracy theories since 1960s
[In his Mémoires pour sérvir à l’histoire du Jacobinisme, Augustin] Barruel traced the core ideas of the French Revolution back to the Manichaean concepts of ‘equality’ and ‘freedom’. He regarded Mani as a paternal father…
Read more of Claus Oberhauser on A. Barruel’s idea of the origins of liberté & egalité
The key assumption in audience research as proposed by Stuart Hall is then that there is no inherent (ideological) meaning in a media text since consumers read, decode, reconstruct and, ultimately, produce meaning in different…
Read more of Stef Aupers on conspiracy theories as oppositional readings
In our age of global interconnectivity, the horizontal network has replaced the vertical pyramid as the primary depiction of conspiracy. – ‘Conspiracy theories and visual culture’, in Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories (2020), p. 452
Many notable writers of this [post-Kennedy] era embraced what Thomas Pynchon [Gravity’s rainbow (1973) New York: Viking, pp. 25, 638] called ‘creative paranoia’ and ‘operational paranoia’ as a reasonable form of social engagement in the…
Read more of Timoty Melley on conspiracy & paranoia in American post-war narrative
Luc Boltanski notices the contemporaneity, in the late nineteenth century, of detective fiction with the first instances of ‘paranoia’ as a psychiatric condition defined by Emil Kraepelin in 1899 and observes that ‘[t]he investigator in…
Read more of Ben Carver on conspiracy theories in nineteenth-century British writing
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.…
There are thus two angles from which one may argue that it can be analytically helpful to look at conspiracy beliefs as a particular form of religion or ‘esotericism’: The social and the epistemic. They…
Read more of Asbjørn Dyrendal on conspiracy beliefs as a form of esotericism
Despite their different nuances across time and regions, then, populist politicians unite in a Manichean worldview, in which societies are seen as divided between the elite and the people. – ‘Conspiracy theory and populism’, in…
Populists position themselves as the enemy of the establishment and global and national elites. Reference to the ‘deep state’ has emerged as a kind of shorthand, allowing populists to contrive an omnipresent, omnipotent force that…
Read more of Julien Giry & Doğan Gürpınar on populism & deep state