Conspiracy theories and the people who believe in them: Book review

This thinking underpins the arguments in this collection that treat conspiracy theories as a kind of folk knowledge, or as a mutation of the common person’s democratic vigilance, as found in the chapters by Alfred Moore (119), Steven M. Smallpage (192) and Michael J. Wood and Karen M. Douglas (251).

The consequence of defining conspiracy theorists as powerless is that doing so distorts the entire study of conspiracy theories. Since conspiracy theorists and their theories exist on the fringes of power, the threat they pose, according to several contributors to Conspiracy Theories, is that they can corrode societal trust and governmental capacity, and that they can be used to upend the status quo by a system’s “losers” (Atkinson and Dewett, 125).

>This may be true, but it leaves the reader with the uncomfortable feeling that something is being missed: that only half the problem is being examined. Conspiracy theories are not just for the powerless. Joseph Stalin, for instance, may not have believed the rationale behind the terror he unleashed in the 1930s, but most good Bolsheviks did, at least initially. In the United States, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI genuinely seem to have believed that civil rights activists were the tools of the Communist International. Both cases are textbook examples of conspiracy theorizing, according to Uscinski’s own definition.

Yet despite its wide range, Conspiracy Theories never discusses either case. This despite the fact that the respective impacts of both were somewhat greater than, say, the impact of the debate over water fluoridation in Portland, Oregon, which is discussed by Uscinski (11). A counterfactual might explain why neither case, or indeed any similar case, is analyzed. What if, instead of Hoover and the FBI imagining that African Americans were engaged in conspiracy, it was the other way around? Luckily, you don’t have to imagine: an essay in Conspiracy Theories by Martin Orr and Ginna Husting looks at how African American concerns over the actions of the American government are routinely dismissed as ‘conspiracy theories’ (85-89). One is left with the impression that if the powerful are doing it, it’s not conspiracy theorizing.

As such, while Conspiracy Theories is an interesting, expansive study of conspiracy theories, it is ultimately incomplete. It is akin to a book on revolutions that only studies revolutions that never got off the ground. In seeking to explain conspiracy theories, only the instances are analyzed. Those conspiracy theories that truly succeed—that capture the epistemological authorities—are never even mentioned, because as soon as they succeed, they are no longer treated as conspiracy theories. We are thus left with no tools with which to analyse that success, despite its potentially grave consequences.

Hopefully this oversight will be corrected in future editions, and will become more of a focus for the entire field of conspiracy theory studies. There is good reason to believe this may happen soon. After all, the conspiracy theorist has made it past the White House fence. He now sits in the Oval Office.

Max Budra, a graduate of the LSE Department of International Relations, works in the alternative investment management industry. This article is published courtesy of the British Politics and Policy at LSE.