Nayanika Mathur, University of Cambridge “Corruption. It’s like a demon sitting on my brain and eating it with a fork and knife.” So bemoans a character in the novelist Aravind Adiga’s Between the Assasinations set in India. While it is commonplace and easy to bemoan the pervasiveness of corruption in India, it is harder to […]
I’ve recently published a special issue of Critical Review, in which a group of political theorists reflect on the place of conspiracy and conspiracy theory in democratic politics. Our former guest on the project, Lawrence Quill, has a piece based on his successful lecture on Technological Conspiracies. I’ve written an introductory essay as well as […]
Psychologists love to measure things, and psychologists who study conspiracy theories are no exception. To understand where conspiracy theories come from, we need to be able to measure the extent to which people believe them. But measuring things is often trickier than it first appears. At first glance, it seems pretty straight-forward. Pick a few […]
The French Revolution saw the invention of a new political system for France, that of modern participatory politics, with an elected legislature, political clubs, and a free press. For the first time France had politicians – answerable not to one man, but to public opinion and to the ‘people’. On the face of it conspiracy […]
