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 […]
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 […]
The Conspiracy and Democracy (C&D) Project, housed by the remarkable Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) began on January 1, 2013 with the generous support of the Leverhulme Trust. Now well into the project, we look back at the year that was. Research Agenda The central question of the […]