Conspiracy, from its Latin root con (with or together) and spirare (to breathe) refers to a group of two or more agents breathing together. The word implies an intimate, whispering, secretive association of conspirators—those who breathe together—who coordinate their activities for a common purpose. A theory, derived from the Greek theoria (spectacle or sight), is a lens or a way of viewing the world. Taken together, the phrase “conspiracy theory,” since its appearance in print during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has come to refer to a way of viewing history (or of interpreting a specific historical event) as the consequence of the association of a small number of interested individuals who work together in secret to devise a desired outcome. Conspiracy theories tend to offer alternative explanations for historical developments. These alternative explanations of historical causality usually reject official narratives developed by government agencies or widely accepted accounts produced by academics, journalists, or other cultural elites. Conspiracy theorists often claim to possess secret knowledge that has been somehow suppressed, hidden, or actively concealed from the normal outlets of public knowledge production.
Conspiracy theories are often highly rational systems built through painstaking research (and sometimes the outright fabrication of evidence) that provide coherent, linear narratives that allow their advocates to make sense of complex economic, political, and social issues. Support for a given conspiracy theory often has important social effects, often creating tight community bonds through the research, production, and dissemination of a theory. Most conspiracy theories exhibit some level of implicit or explicit criticism of the economic, political, or social status quo. Many theories are overtly racist, sexist, or ethnocentric and exhibit hostility to social outsiders or other minority groups.
Conspiracies, Real and Imagined
History is rife with famous conspiracies. In the Western world, the plot to assassinate Julius Caesar (d. 44 BCE) by Brutus, Cassius, and a group of Roman senators stands as an archetypal political conspiracy, immortalized for English speakers in William Shakespeare’s play. In English history, a conspiracy of English Catholics to assassinate the Protestant king James I by blowing up Westminster Palace, known as the Gunpowder Plot (1605), is an essential component of English national memory. In the United States, political and economic conspiracies have played an important role in shaping the nation’s history. In the early 1800s, Aaron Burr, Thomas Jefferson’s vice president, famously entered into a murky conspiracy to wrest a significant territorial portion of North America from the U.S. government. The abolitionist crusader John Brown conspired to start an open insurrection against slavery at Harpers Ferry in 1859. In the 1920s, a group of businessmen and federal officials conspired to open the Teapot Dome oil reserves in Wyoming to drilling and enrich all involved through favorable leases and secret financial deals. In short, real conspiracies abound, even if they tend to end in failure—or at least exposure—for the conspirators.
Aside from such very real conspiracies, Americans have also refined a particularly conspiratorial view of historical change that has ebbed and flowed in popular culture since the first European colonists began settling in the New World. Historians have noted a pervasive fear of conspiracies in American cultural history. For example, intellectual historian Bernard Bailyn has argued that the fear of conspiracies played an important role in the imagination of the United States’ founding revolutionary generation. The eighteenth century “was an age of ideology” in which accusations of “conspiratorial design settled easily into a structure of historical interpretation” (Bailyn 1992, 158–159). While America’s revolutionaries feared conspiracies from British loyalists in North America, the revolutionaries were themselves conspirators against the Crown. This example raises one of the chief difficulties with the term “conspiracy”: it connotes a sinister judgment of the participants’ motives. One person’s “conspiracy” is another’s battle for liberty. Further, the observation of a “conspiracy” may misidentify the motivations and misinterpret the agency of historical actors.
Conspiracy Theories in American Popular Culture
Although the phrase “conspiracy theory” did not become common until the early 1900s, all manner of conspiracy thinking has been documented in U.S. history. In the early days of the United States, Americans were especially sensitive to outside influence and on the lookout for covert foreign influence on the young republic. Immediately following the American Revolution, Timothy Dwight, a president of Yale College and a Congregationalist minister, identified the secret influence of the Bavarian Illuminati, a secretive Masonic fraternal order, as a threat to the constitution. Fears of a grand Illuminati conspiracy to overthrow religion and corrupt American democracy long outlived Rev. Dwight and remains a perennially popular conspiracy theory in American culture. Throughout the nineteenth century, Americans worried about the influence of religious groups on American institutions, specifically singling out seemingly secret sects that supposedly had divided loyalties. This led to the development of complex conspiracy theories warning of secret attempts by the Roman Catholic Church, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), and other religious outsiders to turn the United States into a theocracy. In the twentieth century, other religious conspiracy fears related to a worldwide Jewish conspiracy to take over the world economy gained popularity with publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1903, a grossly anti-Semitic document forged in czarist Russia and distributed, in part, by the automobile manufacturer Henry Ford (Barkun 1997).
The 1950s and 1960s were a particularly tumultuous period in American history. The Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union spawned fears of an international Communist conspiracy to destroy American-style democracy and capitalism. Interest in conspiracy theories became acute following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. A wide array of theories emerged to dispute the government’s official investigation of the assassination laid out in the Warren Commission Report (1964). Organizations such as the John Birch Society had already popularized numerous conspiracy theories, while unrest caused by immigration, a sharp increase in domestic crime rates, the civil rights movement, and the anti–Vietnam War movement all helped cultivate deep distrust of foreign and domestic governments. All of these factors, combined with the Watergate political conspiracy that forced the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974, helped to make the U.S. government the focus of numerous conspiracy theories in the last decades of the twentieth century. Some of these theories insisted that the U.S. government had been taken over by foreign agents, such as the United Nations, the NOW (New World Order), or the ZOG (Zionist Occupation Government), helping to fuel the development of radical, countercultural movements such as the militia movement of the 1990s.
Perhaps the most discussed conspiracy theories of the early twentieth century relate to divergent interpretations of the events of September 11, 2001. The U.S. government’s official investigation into the terrorist attacks in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania, outlined in its 9/11 Commission Report (2004), implicated a small network of foreign conspirators affiliated with the international terrorist organization Al Qaeda. Alternative interpretations emerged immediately with numerous scholars, journalists, and amateur investigators finding evidence of a host of other conspirators in the plot. Some blamed the U.S. government, claiming the World Trade Center was destroyed with controlled explosions and that the Pentagon was attacked with a cruise missile. Other theories blamed foreign governments, global institutions such as the United Nations, and even space aliens. Official assessments of 9/11 always faced a surplus of information that exceeded any single synthesis or narrative. Important works, such as French journalist Thierry Meyssan’s 9/11: The Big Lie (2002), exploited this surplus of information to offer popular counter-explanations of the attacks. Further, the online distribution of the films Loose Change (2005–2009) and Zeitgeist (2007) popularized various conspiratorial interpretations that ultimately blamed the U.S. government for the attacks. In the years following 9/11, those supporting one or another of these alternative theories became known as “Truthers” because of their loose association with the “9/11 Truth” movement.
For centuries, English writers have entertained readers with stories of secret plots, clandestine meetings, and behind-the-scenes intrigue. In recent years, conspiracy theories featuring secret government operations and elaborate cover-ups have captured the imagination of the public. Some conspiracy theorists believe that the 9/11 Commission Report ignores evidence of possible U.S. military involvement in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, regardless of how outrageous their claims might seem to the unbiased observer. (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks)
Conspiracy Theories in Scholarly Literature
Although interest in conspiracy theories has many antecedents in popular and academic history, sustained scholarly interest only developed in British and American circles following World War II. In the second volume of The Open Society and Its Enemies, the influential Austrian-born and London-based philosopher Karl Popper attacked what he called the “conspiracy theory of society,” which sees history as the product of the “whims and wills” of a small, secret elite (Popper 1966, 306). Popper challenged social scientists to abandon any theories that emphasized direct human agency in history and instead focus their attention on studying the unintended consequences of the intentional actions of human and institutional agents. Popper’s injunction was primarily aimed at left-leaning or Marxist-inspired conspiracy theories of economic and social manipulation popular in European circles (Coady 2006, 3–4). Unlike in Europe, in the United States the “conspiracy theory of society” has more often been the product of the Right wing rather than of the Left, especially in the twentieth century.
The cultural historian Richard Hofstadter identified conspiracy thinking as part of a long, continuous “paranoid style” in American politics with roots in the very origins of American national identity. In his famous essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (1964) Hofstadter traced a number of popular “conspiratorial fantasies” (77) ranging from the perceived dangers of the Illuminati and Masonry in the eighteenth century to Jesuits and Mormons in the nineteenth to Communist influence in the twentieth. Hofstadter interpreted popular interest in conspiracy theories as a symptom of social unease caused by concerns over racial issues and immigration and the loss of social status among certain social groups. Like Popper and other social scientists in the postwar era, Hofstadter viewed conspiracy theories as one of the most dangerous aspects of media technologies, the democratization of information, and the rise of mass culture.
The philosophical, historical, and sociological interest in conspiracy theories following World War II tended to emphasize conspiracy theories as the natural ideological coping mechanism for dealing with social and cultural change (Bell 1964; Lipset and Raab 1970). In the face of displacement, disruption, and collective trauma, people generate symbolic interpretations that implicate others as the sources of their misery. These “others” may be outsiders (foreigners, imperialists, evil deities, space aliens) or suspect minority groups that form part of the dominant population but nonetheless retain a liminal position in society. These include racial minorities, religious minorities, sexual minorities—women and homosexuals—or a specific subclass—workers, businessmen, bureaucrats—of a given group. In short, midcentury scholarship tended to see conspiracy theories as especially acute manifestations of group identity formation and the problem of assimilating or regulating otherness. Debunking the irrationality of conspiracy theories and exposing their social effects, therefore, became an important mechanism of social control and the regulation of political rationality in pluralistic democracies like the United States during the twentieth century.
More recent scholarly work on conspiracy theories, however, has tended to challenge the entire concept in favor of emphasizing the epistemological questions raised by such theories. Anthropologists and cultural theorists have moved away from the modernist perspectives favored by Popper and Hofstadter to emphasize how conspiracy theories operate similarly to other modes of cultural transmission. For example, folklorist Patricia Turner tracked various rumors of conspiracy that circulated in African American communities in the United States. Rather than dwelling on the factuality of the conspiracy theories themselves, Turner instead emphasized how they spread like gossip and grew out of the local concerns of the communities that generated them (Turner 1993). Sociologist Michael Barkun has emphasized that conspiracy theories are built from “stigmatized knowledge,” which is distributed through unregulated channels of new media to create novel folklore traditions (Barkun 2013). Similarly, Mark Fenster has argued that conspiracy theories have become an integral part of the culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries because new media, especially in the form of cheap, digital reproduction and the Internet, have decentralized knowledge production and allowed the seemingly infinite proliferation of new conspiracy theories (Fenster 2008). Literary theorist Timothy Melley has likewise pointed out that most conspiracy theories—and the concerted effort to debunk them—developed in response to concerns about the loss of political and intellectual agency in the twentieth century (Melley 2000). The result of this rethinking is that some scholars have gone so far as to urge the abandonment of the category of “conspiracy theory” because the concept implies that the ideas being studied are prejudged as false, marginal, and essentially irrational (Pelkmans and Machold 2011).
Michael J. McVicar
See also Alien Abduction Stories and UFOs; Area 51; Bilderbergers; New World Order; September 11 (2001) Conspiracy Theories; X-Files
Further Reading
Bailyn, Bernard. 1992. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Barkun, Michael. 1997. Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Barkun, Michael. 2013. A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. 2nd ed. Comparative Studies in Religion and Society 15. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bell, Daniel, ed. 1964. The Radical Right: The New American Right. 2nd ed. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Coady, David. 2006. Conspiracy Theories: The Philosophical Debate. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Critchlow, Donald T., John Korasick, and Matthew C. Sherman, eds. 2008. Political Conspiracies in America: A Reader. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Fenster, Mark. 2008. Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hofstadter, Richard. 1964. “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Harper’s Magazine, November. http://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/. Accessed July 1, 2015.
Lipset, Seymour Martin, and Earl Raab. 1970. The Politics of Unreason: Right Wing Extremism in America, 1790–1970. Patterns of American Prejudice Series v. 5. New York: Harper & Row.
Melley, Timothy. 2000. Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Meyssan, Thierry. 2002. 9/11: The Big Lie. London: Carnot.
Pelkmans, Mathijs, and Rhys Machold. 2011. “Conspiracy Theories and Their Truth Trajectories.” Focaal (59): 66–80.
Popper, Karl R. 1966. The Open Society and Its Enemies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Turner, Patricia A. 1993. I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Walker, Jesse. 2013. The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory. New York: HarperCollins.