Project Director Professor David Runciman spoke to the Humanities Society at Wolfson College, Cambridge University in May 2014. 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. […]
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 examines some of the contemporary legacies of this claim about the secret agenda of democratic self-rule, with a focus on some famous […]
Professor Olmsted’s (Professor and Chair of History at the University of California, Davis) talk 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, […]
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 […]
Professor Deborah E. Lipstadt (Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University) visited the project in May 2014. Holocaust denial, the attempt to deny that the Third Reich engaged in the annihilation of approximately of six million Jews, has been depicted as a serious threat to historical truth. Others have dismissed […]
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, […]
A Public Lecture by Conspiracy & Democracy Visiting Fellow Professor Cornel Zwierlein (Ruhr-Universität Bochum). 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 […]
Dr Pascal Girard (Reims) speaks about ‘Conspiracy Theories in France and Italy during the Cold War and Decolonization’. Dr Girard’s talk explores how in the late forties and in the fifties, conspiracy was a significant concern in French and Italian politics. Dr Girard describes how the “red scare” greatly varied depending on the period, the […]
Mr Smith’s talk explored how the idea of the mafia and conspiracy emerged in America, developed and became entangled in very different contexts. Mr Smith describes 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 […]