Truthers, birthers, flat-Earthers, the deep state, crisis actors, chemtrails, the Epstein files, Pizzagate, the Plandemic鈥攊t seems as though there鈥檚 a conspiracy theory for every situation. But what exactly is a conspiracy theory? And why is the term used to describe beliefs that are so very unlike theories (at least in the scientific sense of the word)? In this erudite and original book, Andrew McKenzie-McHarg answers these questions not by formulating a definition but by tracing a genealogy. He uncovers two crucial strands of contemporary conspiracy theorizing on the threshold of modernity: on the one hand, political analysis as realized by Niccol貌 Machiavelli in such works as The Prince and, on the other, apocalyptic prophecy as channeled by the charismatic preacher Girolamo Savonarola.
The French Revolution, the antisemitic hoax known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the Nuremberg Trials number among the subsequent episodes that progressively entangled these strands before finally knotting them into the twentieth-century concept of conspiracy theory. Alternative labels were also offered, most strikingly by the historian Richard Hofstadter, whose engagement with American right-wing politics in the 1950s and 1960s inspired his notion of the paranoid style. As McKenzie-McHarg shows, Hofstadter鈥檚 coinage, with its psychological bent, contributed to personalizing our understanding of conspiracy theory, thus yielding a specific type of person that, for better or worse, has become all too familiar to us today: the conspiracy theorist.
Proceeding from The Prince through The Protocols to the paranoid style and then beyond to QAnon, The Hidden History of Conspiracy Theory sheds new light on a complex and troubling phenomenon.
Andrew McKenzie-McHarg was a research fellow at the Forschungszentrum Gotha, University of Erfurt, and then on the Conspiracy and Democracy Project at the University of Cambridge before joining the Bibliotheca Hertziana–Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome.
“We live in an age of conspiracy theories, yet we know very little about how conspiracy theory as a conceptual term originated or evolved. This book is a major contribution to our knowledge and understanding of conspiracy theory, effortlessly learned and utterly absorbing.”—Richard J. Evans, author of The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination
“Why are some theories called ‘theories’ while others are called ‘conspiracy theories’? How does such labeling affect how society views those theories labeled ‘conspiracy theories’? Andrew McKenzie-McHarg’s long-anticipated The Hidden History of Conspiracy Theory seeks to answer these and other questions regarding the intellectual history of conspiracy theory by examining how key thinkers, particularly throughout twentieth-century history, have developed and molded the concept. While McKenzie-McHarg is focused on the terminology and conceptualization of ‘conspiracy theory,’ this engaging contribution is a must-read for anyone interested in the substance of conspiracy theories themselves as well as their place in our society and their potential harms. The Hidden History of Conspiracy Theory is poised to be one of the most important contributions to the burgeoning field of conspiracy theory research.”—Joseph E. Uscinski, coauthor of Conspiracy Theories: A Primer
“In this brilliant new history, Andrew McKenzie-McHarg explains how the term ‘conspiracy theory’ entered our conceptual vocabulary. Everyone interested in the subject should read it.”—Kathryn S. Olmsted, author of The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler
“This brilliant, witty debut traverses the long prehistory of the conspiracy theory from the Italian Renaissance, via the French Revolution and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, to the present day. But Andrew McKenzie-McHarg does not merely offer an erudite genealogy of his subject, spiced with a literary critic's ear for verbal nuance; vitally, he also asks us to think philosophically about what a conspiracy, and a conspiracy theory, and a conspiracy theorist, have been—and are.”—Anthony Ossa-Richardson, author of A History of Ambiguity
“In this brilliantly erudite and profound book, Andrew McKenzie-McHarg traces the genealogy of today’s conspiracy theories back to the Renaissance. Confronting Machiavelli’s ‘analytical’ account of conspiracies with Savonarola’s ‘prophetic’ expectation of a clash between the forces of good and evil, he elegantly reconstructs the concept’s evolution through the French Revolution, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Nuremberg trials, Franz Neumann’s ‘conspiracy theory of history’ and Richard Hofstadter’s ‘paranoid style’, before finally arriving at the countercultural activist Carl Oglesby and the rise of the ‘conspiracy theorist’ in the late twentieth century. Combining the historian’s art with an eye for the present, after The Hidden History of Conspiracy Theory we will never look at conspiracy theories the same way again.”—Hugo Drochon, author of Elites and Democracy
