Critical Review

A Journal of Politics and Society

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Conspiracy and Conspiracy Theories in Democratic

Politics

Alfred Moore

To cite this article: Alfred Moore (2016) Conspiracy and Conspiracy Theories in Democratic
Politics, Critical Review, 28:1, 1-23, DOI: 10.1080/08913811.2016.1178894

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 Alfred Moore

CONSPIRACY AND CONSPIRACY THEORIES

IN DEMOCRATIC POLITICS
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ABSTRACT: While conspiracies have always been with us, conspiracy theories are
more recent arrivals. The framing of conspiracy theories as rooted in erroneous or
delusional belief in conspiracies is characteristic of “positive” approaches to the
topic, which focus on identifying the causes and cures of conspiracy theories. “Criti-
cal” approaches, by contrast, focus on the historical and cultural construction of the
concept of conspiracy theory itself. This issue presents a range of essays that cut across
these two broad approaches, and reflect on the problematic relationship between con-
spiracy theory and democratic politics.
Keywords: conspiracy; conspiracy theories; democracy; markets; networks; partisanship; populism;
technocracy.

Conspiracies, in the legal sense of “a secret plan by a group to do some-

thing unlawful or harmful” (OED), have always been with us. Conspira-
cies are a constant danger in all domains of society, from business to
finance to administration to medicine. The most prominent examples
of real conspiracies come from high politics (where it is often rational
to be paranoid), such as Richard Nixon’s attempt to subvert an FBI
investigation into the Watergate burglaries. But there are many less
well-known cases of organized and covert abuse of public authority.

Alfred Moore, am@cam.ac.uk, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts,
Social Sciences, and Humanities, University of Cambridge, thanks his colleagues on the Lever-
hulme Conspiracy and Democracy project (RP-CO), and thanks, in particular, Jeffrey
Friedman, David Runciman and David Singh Grewal for helpful comments on earlier drafts.
Critical Review (): – ISSN - print, - online
©  Critical Review Foundation http://dx.doi.org/./..
  Critical Review Vol. , No. 

Consider the fate of Elmer Allen, an African American whose cancerous

leg was amputated on July , , but who was also surreptitiously
injected with plutonium by doctors who had signed an oath of secrecy
to carry out experiments on unwitting patients for the Atomic Energy
Commission. Allen suspected that something was wrong with the way
he was treated, but not only did the scientists deny his claims; his
doctor diagnosed him a paranoid schizophrenic (see Washington ,
–). The rise of a large and active state in the twentieth century,
and in particular the growth of security bureaucracy, has been the
source of many conspiracies against the public in the form of covert dom-
estic surveillance and “countersubversive” activities. Indeed, historian
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Kathryn Olmsted argues that the rise in belief in conspiracy theories in

the United States in the late twentieth century cannot be entirely
detached from both the increased capacity of the national security
bureaucracy to engage in conspiracies against its real and imagined
enemies and to increased public awareness of these efforts, at least since
the investigations of, among other bodies, the Church Committee of
the U.S. Senate in  (Olmsted , ).
Conspiracies, in the political sense of a plot to usurp government, are
also an ever-present threat, rare in some times and places, more common
in others, but a possibility for all regime types. The political debates
around the period of the American Revolution were laced with
genuine fears of “a conspiracy against liberty . . . nourished by corruption”
(Bailyn , xiii). Fears of conspiracy and accusations of conspiracy, real
and imagined, were ubiquitous during the French Revolution (Cubitt
), and have recurred in subsequent revolutions, which are themselves
almost inherently conspiratorial. In the late nineteenth century, America
saw a period of heightened suspicion of corporate power marked by accu-
sations of conspiracy by monied interests from both sides of the political
spectrum (Uscinski and Parent ). And, of course, the early Cold
War years saw an intense suspicion that the U.S. government was being
subverted by Communists.

“Conspiracy Theory” and Liberal Democracy

Conspiracy theories, in the current colloquial use of the term, seem to go
further than simply imagining or investigating conspiracies like those listed
above. They seem to involve explaining events or phenomena in a way
that is unwarranted, implausible, or even dangerous, invoking ever
 Moore • Conspiracy Theories in Democratic Politics 

broader and deeper conspiracies and discounting all contradictory evi-

dence. Conspiracy theories in this sense first began to take shape as a
public problem in the s and s. Karl Popper introduced the
term in the second edition of The Open Society and its Enemies in ,
where he described the “conspiracy theory of society” as “the view that
an explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery of the
men or groups who are interested in the occurrence of this phenomenon
(sometimes it is a hidden interest which has first to be revealed), and who
have planned and conspired to bring it about” (Popper [] , ).
This sort of theory is characterized by a theistic structure populated by
secular actors. “The gods are abandoned. But their place is filled by
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powerful men or groups—sinister pressure groups whose wickedness is

responsible for all the evils we suffer from—such as the Learned Elders
of Zion, or the monopolists, or the capitalists, or the imperialists” (ibid.).
Popper introduces the term in a discussion of the autonomy of social
science, where he argues against two errors: on the one hand, the ten-
dency to reduce society to the laws of individual psychology; on the
other hand, to explain society in terms of the agency of social
“wholes.” Thus, if you try to explain some phenomenon (like rising
inequality) in terms of the agency of some entity (like “the  percent”),
then you are either talking figuratively or you’re making a mistake.
You’re making a mistake, first, because there is no such entity as “the 
percent.” You might use collective labels as a shorthand for collections
of individuals. But to say that “the  percent” or “the working class”
has its own agency is simply an error. And you’re making a mistake,
second, because you are speaking as if large-scale effects can be explained
in terms of the intentions of specific actors, whereas in fact collective
effects are typically the unintended consequences of multiple individual
actions. These two mistakes, the illusion that there exist social “wholes”
that can be subjects of action, and the illusion that individuals can direct
and control social action, were compounded in the “conspiracy theory
of society.”
Popper’s comments on the “conspiracy theory of society” were brief
but have resonated with many commentators on the topic, who frame
conspiracy theory in terms of the error of seeing agency and design
behind what are in fact the undesigned results of complex interactions.
By focusing on the malign intentions or designs of particular actors, con-
spiracy theorists are said to make the “fundamental attribution error,” pri-
vileging dispositional explanations, which turn on the character and
  Critical Review Vol. , No. 

intention of particular actors, over situational, which is to say, environ-

mental or contextual explanations (Clarke , ). Such explanations
are uniquely ill fitted for making sense of a complex, interdependent
world. “Conspiracy theorists,” Brian Keeley writes, “are the last believers
in an ordered universe” (Keeley , ). The real world, he suggests,
simply does not work like that: “The world as we understand it today is
made up of an extremely large number of interacting agents, each with its
own imperfect view of the world and its own set of goals. Such a system
cannot be controlled because there are simply too many agents to be
handled by any small controlling group. There are too many independent
degrees of freedom. This is true of the economy, of the political electo-
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rate, and of the very social, fact-gathering institutions upon which conspi-
racy theorists cast doubt” (ibid., ). By invoking the idea that some
hidden group of people is directing events, conspiracy theorists avoid con-
fronting a world in which there is typically not a strong correspondence
between outcomes and the intentions of any of the people whose inter-
action produced them. The world simply does not work like that, if it
ever did. The emphasis on the causal force of small groups working in
secret thus seems to mark the naïveté of the conspiratorial mind.
In , Richard Hofstadter famously described a “paranoid style” in
American politics, evident in episodes ranging from accusations of a “con-
spiracy” of the Illuminati and the Masons against “all the religions and
governments of Europe” (according to John Robison, a Scottish scientist,
in ), to fears of a Jesuit plot in the early to mid-s, to the anti-
Communism of the American right of the s, personified by
Senator Joseph McCarthy. Hofstadter treated all these episodes as manifes-
tations of a recurring “style,” motivated by a set of inchoate resentments
and anxieties, and characterized by Manichean dualism, apocalyptic
visions, and a pedantic and obsessive accumulation of evidence combined
with remarkable leaps of imagination. He suggests that this style of
thought is to some degree ever present, “more or less constantly affecting
a modest minority of the population.” The paranoid sees the enemy as “a
kind of amoral superman” who “wills, indeed he manufactures, the
mechanism of history” (Hofstadter ). Although Hofstadter did not
use the term conspiracy theory, subsequent work in social psychology and
political science has had no difficulty in taking his essay as the inspiration
for the study of conspiracy theory as a species of popular paranoid delu-
sion. Indeed, we can see a continuity between Adorno et al.’s studies of
the “authoritarian personality” in the s, Hofstadter’s “paranoid
 Moore • Conspiracy Theories in Democratic Politics 

style,” and theorizing about the specific problem of popular belief in

“conspiracy theories,” which appeared in the s in work on the
social psychology of crowds and leaders (Graumann and Moscovici
) and has flourished in recent years in contemporary psychology.
The history of conspiracy theory, in this line of thought, is a history of
delusion and paranoia, and research into the “causes and cures” of conspir-
atorial thinking (Sunstein and Vermeule ) is motivated by the poten-
tial threat posed by the masses to the “representatives and defenders of the
public order” (Graumann , ).
The problem of “conspiracy theory” has in recent years become a focus
of concern in both political science and broader political discourse in the
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developed democracies. Conspiracy theories have been linked to a general

crisis of trust in government (Bartlett and Miller , ; Critchlow et al.
, xi; Goldberg , ). They have been associated with group
polarization (Sunstein , –). And they have been charged with
promoting a “vicious cycle of cynicism” (Einstein and Glick ),
whereby political scandals diminish trust in government, leading to
higher levels of conspiracy belief even in areas unconnected to those scan-
dals. Widespread belief in conspiracies is thought to prevent governments
from getting on with the business of governing by provoking vexatious
investigations, accusations, and trials that take up the attention and
resources of officials (Uscinski and Parent , ). It is also said to under-
mine government by motivating non-compliance with authorized public
policies, as in the case of conspiracy theories about, for example, vacci-
nation (Oliver and Wood ). The public health response to the
Ebola outbreak, Brendan Nyhan () recently argued, was “hampered
by conspiracy theories about its causes.” And conspiracy theories are
thought to be a contributory factor—a “radicalizing multiplier”—in
extremist political violence (Bartlett and Miller , ). Violent individ-
uals, such as Timothy McVeigh (Uscinski and Parent , ) and
Anders Breivik (see Fekete ; Berntzen et al. ), had a deeply con-
spiratorial worldview. Conspiracy theories challenging the official
account of / are widespread in the Middle East, as were conspiratorial
anti-Semitism in Germany in the s. Looking back at the twentieth
century, Volker Heins argues that where “collective anxieties become
focused on a single fantasmatic enemy, such as ‘the Jews’ or ‘Trotskyism,’”
conspiracy theories “may become a vehicle for the rise of totalitarian
forms of rule” and “a threat to the survival of liberal democracy” itself
(Heins , ). Conspiracy theory, in this tradition, appears as an
  Critical Review Vol. , No. 

ever-present potential affliction of individuals and groups and a potential

popular threat to a liberal order. Eternal vigilance against the threats to
liberal order underpin this entire research program. One sort of response
to conspiracy talk, then, is to regard it as erroneous and pathological, a
species of paranoid delusion.
This broad body of work, ranging from Popper and Hofstadter to con-
temporary political science, suggests a link between conspiracy theory and
democracy. First, conspiracy theory is framed against the assumption that
in the advanced democracies, real conspiracies are hard to sustain, such
that imagining a conspiracy is a poor first step in making sense of political
and social reality. Where a political and social order is relatively stable,
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transparent, and legible, it is assumed that it is generally implausible to

suppose conspiracy rather than a mess up. In this view, conspiratorial pre-
sumptions may be a plausible way of interpreting political events in Paki-
stan (Iqtidar ), Iran (Chehabi ), or Russia (Dawisha ), where
there is limited information about government actions and a long track
record of covert influence by foreign forces. In advanced democracies,
however, with practices of governmental transparency, strong and inde-
pendent legal systems, historically and internationally low levels of cor-
ruption (at least in the narrow quid-pro-quo sense of the term), an
active and largely independent press, and a variety of civil-society and
interest groups monitoring the behavior of authorities, conspiracy theo-
rizing seems less plausible. Moreover, in the context of a largely stable
and transparent democratic order, conspiracy theory seems to represent
a threat to the proper functioning of democracy itself.

Critical Perspectives on the Concept of Conspiracy Theory

In contrast to what we might call the “positive” approaches to the
problem of conspiracy theory, which focus on identifying the causes of
belief in conspiracy theories, a range of scholars from different disciplines
have sought to critically address the concept of “conspiracy theory” itself.
One way of doing so has been to place the concept more firmly in par-
ticular historical contexts. It has been widely observed that the American
revolutionaries, from Adams to Jefferson, were prone to seeing British
conspiracies at work against the early American republic. Yet Gordon
Wood argued against the tendency, prevalent in histories of the eighteenth
century written in the s and s, to read the American Revolution-
aries as paranoid conspiracists avant la lettre, because “American secular
 Moore • Conspiracy Theories in Democratic Politics 

thought—in fact, all enlightened thought of the eighteenth century—was

structured in such a way that conspiratorial explanations of complex events
became normal, necessary, and rational” (Wood , ). What Wood
effectively gives us is a historicized political epistemology. He is interested
not in whether or not Jefferson was right to read British actions in the s
and s as “a deliberate, systematical plan of reducing us to slavery,” but
rather in the question of why eighteenth-century thought was structured so
as to make it seem rational and reasonable to interpret politics in terms of
the motives and intentions of small numbers of actors. Wood claimed
that societal complexity and interdependence led to a growing gap
between leaders’ actions and the effects of these actions, and that conspir-
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atorial interpretations emerged as a way of explaining those effects without

invoking supernatural entities. This view of social causality, Wood con-
cluded, was overtaken in the early nineteenth century by the view that
the outcomes of complex systems were generally the unintended conse-
quences of human action. This modern mode of social thought placed
less emphasis on intentions, motives, and individual agency, and more on
interests, social structures, and aggregate collective effects. Conspiratorial
ways of looking at the world did not go away, but they became more
marginal.
Cultural historian Michael Butter () echoes the overall shape of
Wood’s argument. Butter, too, argues that emblematic episodes of “para-
noid” politics in American history, from the Catholic conspiracy theory of
the early- to mid-nineteenth century to antebellum conspiracy theories
about slavery and more recently still the Communist conspiracy theories
of the s, were, at the time, far from marginal or fringe phenomena.
All these conspiracy theories shared an underlying epistemology in
which claims about conspiracy were widely accepted as credible and legit-
imate forms of knowledge. Butter confirms the structure of Wood’s argu-
ment, but contends that he got the timing wrong. It was not until the
s, Butter argues, that conspiracy theory ceased to be a credible
form of knowledge. Regardless of the timing, however, this line of
thought suggests that what is distinctive about our era is the marginal
and disreputable character of explanations of complex social realities in
terms of agency and intention. One interesting question that emerges
from this line of research is how imagining conspiracies went from
being “normal and rational” to being a sign of deviant personality or a
“crippled epistemology.”
  Critical Review Vol. , No. 

Some cultural theorists treat conspiracy theory as a response to genuine

anxieties about the location of power in complex societies. “Just because
overarching conspiracy theories are wrong,” as Mark Fenster puts it, “does
not mean that they are not on to something” (Fenster , ; my empha-
sis). What exactly are they “on to”? For Fenster, they are an indirect
response to real structural inequalities and weakening of the public
realm in late capitalism. Drawing on Laclau’s notion of “populist
reason,” Fenster treats conspiracy theories as “an ideological misrecogni-
tion of power relations” involving a populist identification of believers
with “the people” as opposed to a secret elite “power bloc” (ibid.). In a
similar vein, Fredric Jameson suggests that conspiracy theory is a “poor
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person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age” (Jameson ,

), motivated by an insight into the nature of late modern global
capitalism but without the structure once provided by grand narratives
(see also White , ). The expansion of capitalist markets, the increas-
ing speed of communications, and the growing division of labor have
created a situation in which it is difficult to make sense of profound
changes that have a direct impact on people’s lives. This generates a
demand for arguments and explanations that personify and make compre-
hensible the impersonal effects of modern capitalism. The sense of power-
lessness in the face of anonymous and large-scale economic and social
changes is characterized by Tim Melley as “agency panic,” which involves
a weakened sense of one’s own agency combined with a conviction that
one’s actions are being controlled by someone else (Melley , ).
Melley’s analysis of cultural representations of conspiracy in postwar
America suggests that “the term ‘conspiracy’ rarely signifies a small,
secret plot any more. Instead, it frequently refers to the workings of a
large organization, technology, or system—a powerful and obscure entity so
dispersed that it is the antithesis of the traditional conspiracy. ‘Conspiracy,’
in other words, has come to signify a broad array of social controls” (ibid.,
). This sort of situation is encapsulated in a scene from The Grapes of
Wrath, where a man on a tractor comes to remove tenants and destroy
their homes. The farmer gets his gun, but the tractor driver pleads that
he’s only doing his job. Well, what about your boss? He’s only doing
his job too. And so on and so on. Behind every action in the chain is a
yet more distant cause, and at no point does there seem to be anyone
capable of taking responsibility for the entire collective product. As
his home is being leveled, the farmer pleads: “Who can we shoot?” (Stein-
beck [] , –). Such grievances, combined with uncertainties
 Moore • Conspiracy Theories in Democratic Politics 

about the location of power, these critics suggest, are the motor of con-
spiratorial thought (though, of course, they need not be channeled in a
conspiratorial direction).
A further change, to democracy itself, took place in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. The expansion of the polity, and the professionaliza-
tion of parties as a way to organize communication and mobilization in a
mass democracy, have rarely been directly thematized in the literature on
conspiracy theories (though for an important exception, see Uscinski and
Parent ). Luc Boltanski (), for instance, argues that conspiracy
narratives dramatize the duality of the democratic state, by which he
means the contradiction between the ideal of democracy as a form of
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self-government grounded in publicity, public communication, and

public justification on the one hand, and the necessary practices of
secrecy in the exercise of state power on the other. However, when Bol-
tanski discusses the anxieties associated with communication, mediation,
and distance that arose in the late nineteenth century, he does not empha-
size their relation to the distinctive problems of political representation
structured predominantly through party competition. Democracies
place a particularly heavy burden of legitimation on the outcomes of pro-
cesses of communication and argumentation, and are thus particularly
sensitive to deception, hypocrisy, and manipulation. For this reason we
might say that narratives of conspiracy express profound cynicism and sus-
picion at the same time as they honor an ideal of communication free
from mistrust and suspicion.
These various critical approaches do not address conspiracy theories
simply as a special sort of error or delusion, but rather as a symptom or
response—albeit perhaps misguided—to real anxieties about causality,
moral attribution, and the location of power in complex societies. In
asking how, and under what historical and social conditions, the category
of “conspiracy theory” itself emerged, they raise the problem of the
boundary between what we now call conspiracy theories and other,
more respectable, forms of social and political critique; for in their
shared concern with identifying the real movements of power beneath
the surface of political appearance, they share an unsettling family resem-
blance (Dean ; Parker ). As Bruno Latour provocatively asked in
a  essay,

what’s the real difference between conspiracists and a popularized . . .

version of social critique? In both cases, you have to learn to become
  Critical Review Vol. , No. 

suspicious of everything people say because of course we all know that they
live in the thralls of a complete illusio of their real motives. Then, after dis-
belief has struck and an explanation is requested for what is really going on,
in both cases again it is the same appeal to powerful agents hidden in the
dark acting always consistently, continuously, relentlessly. Of course, we
in the academy like to use more elevated causes—society, discourse,
knowledge-slash-power, fields of forces, empires, capitalism—while con-
spiracists like to portray a miserable bunch of greedy people with dark
intents, but I find something troublingly similar in the structure of the
explanation, in the first movement of disbelief and, then, in the wheeling
of causal explanations coming out of the deep dark below. (Latour ,
–)
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Boltanski identifies a similar parallel, and discusses at length the ways in

which social theory has sought to escape what he calls “Popper’s curse,”
namely the problem of finding a way to analyze and explain the actions
and effects of unofficial collective entities (such as the “ruling class,”
“the fossil fuel lobby,” or the “military industrial complex”) without
sounding like a conspiracy theorist. As Boltanski frames the problem,
“if the most notorious sign by which persons accused of paranoia are
recognized is the fact that they attribute historical or personal events to
the action of large-scale entities, on which they confer a sort of intention-
ality and capacity for action, how could we manage to keep similar accu-
sations from being addressed to sociologists?” (Boltanski , ).

What Can Political Theory Contribute?

I have tried to make an admittedly rough and ready distinction between
what we might call “positive” and “critical” approaches to the problem of
conspiracy theory in contemporary democracies. The “positive”
approaches treat conspiracy theory as erroneous or delusional belief in
conspiracies, and are guided by the twin questions: “Why do people
believe in conspiracy theories?” and “What can we do about it?” These
approaches are of course critical in the sense that they treat the substantive
content of conspiracy theories as problematic, unwarranted, or irrational,
but they tend not to concern themselves with the question of how, and in
what context, the term conspiracy theory itself came to acquire its current
status. The critical approaches, for their part, also address the question
of why people believe in conspiracy theories, but their focus tends to
be on the historical and cultural construction of the concept of conspiracy
 Moore • Conspiracy Theories in Democratic Politics 

theory itself. They ask: How do people think about conspiracies? Why do
some ways of imagining conspiracies attract the label conspiracy theory while
others do not? How did “conspiracy theories” come to be distinguished
(and continue to be distinguished) from more respectable ways of think-
ing about or inquiring into conspiracy, collusion, and hidden connivances
in the exercise of power?
The originality of the contributions to this issue of Critical Review is that
they combine elements of both approaches, drawing on the tools of con-
temporary political theory and intellectual history to analyze how con-
spiracies and conspiracy theories operate in democratic politics. These
essays broaden the frame within which we approach the problem at
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hand. Rather than focusing directly on the figure of “conspiracy

theory,” they begin with enduring and problematic aspects of democratic
politics, such as the nature of representation and partisan competition, the
dangers of elite rule, and the uneasy relationship between individual and
collective agency.
In “Conspiracy Theory in a Networked World,” David Singh Grewal
distinguishes “sovereign” power, characterized by formal and largely
transparent hierarchies of command and obedience, from the “sociable”
power represented by networked forms of governance, which rely on
informal norms operating through social structures. Globalization is the
central manifestation of this sort of informal “networked” power. Con-
necting and collaborating with others in large networks creates opportu-
nities that would not otherwise exist, but it does so only on condition of
playing by rules of the game that are not easy to change, and not equally
easy for everyone to take up. These rules of the game, furthermore, were
typically not designed by anyone, but rather emerged naturally, so to
speak, from apparently voluntary interactions and exchanges between
large numbers of people. There might well have been direct force and
manipulation involved in the initial introduction and expansion of a
dominant standard, but once such a standard has been established, “the
further spread of such a standard may then occur through network
power without any ongoing agency on the part of its beneficiaries”
(Grewal ). This does not mean, of course, that there were no alterna-
tives. Nor does it mean that the standards and rules that successfully
became established do not operate to the structural advantage of particular
actors. But it does mean that the power manifest in networks is hard to
conceptualize and identify. Network structures, then, embed power
  Critical Review Vol. , No. 

relations, but it is not power on the “sovereign” model of command and

obedience.
Conspiracy theories, Grewal suggests, can be interpreted as attempts to
make sense of such decentered “network power.” Where there is no good
account of how agency is involved in the creation of structures that in turn
undermine or constrain agency, there will be a demand for other ways of
representing that power, and this may include imagining that “underneath
a process of this kind, someone is pulling the strings” (ibid.). “Just as the
charge of ‘tyranny’ has long served as a criticism of unaccountable power
in the relations of sovereignty, perhaps the charge of ‘conspiracy’ now
serves to criticize the unaccountable power at work in the relations of
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sociability” (ibid.). Rather than read conspiracy theories as a sort of

error—that of imagining intentional agency and design where there is
in fact only accidental emergence—he presents a more interesting possi-
bility: we could read them as explicitly counterfactual epistemic devices,
whose utility lies not in their representational accuracy, but in their
predictive power. Drawing on Milton Friedman’s account of “as-if”
reasoning (a term borrowed from Hans Vaihinger), Grewal introduces
the notion of “as-if” conspiracies. “The deliberate distance from descrip-
tive veracity is the advantage of this style of reasoning, since it allows one
to bracket the internal characteristics of a phenomenon and focus on the
utility of making predictions as if a particular assumption were true. In
cases of alleged conspiracy, above all, such bracketing is all the more war-
ranted, since the underlying causal dynamics in a social system are not only
difficult or time-consuming to determine (as in social science inquiries)
but may be deliberately hidden or otherwise impossible to ascertain”
(ibid.). Thus, in the case of national security, where detailed grounds
for decisions are (often quite justifiably) secret, a person who reasoned
“as if” there were “an elite cabal connected to the intelligence sector
control[ling] the policy decisions of the president of the United States
and other relevant elected officials” would have “accurately foreseen . . .
that the transfer of power from George W. Bush to Barack Obama would
herald no significant change in illegal surveillance” and related policies
(ibid.). This person could believe, furthermore, that this is not literally
true. As-if conspiracy theorizing simply serves as a cognitive shortcut.
While there can be considerable utility to this way of thinking, as illus-
trated by the context of EU decision making and by academic analyses
of international economic order as the “invisible hand of American
Empire,” it has a distinctive weakness: it “will only remain predictive . . .
 Moore • Conspiracy Theories in Democratic Politics 

so long as the (unanalyzed) dynamics generating these outcomes continue

in their operation” (ibid.). Nonetheless, Grewal usefully shifts the discus-
sion of conspiracy theories from the register of truth or falsehood, and its
attendant diagnoses of paranoia and delusion, to the register of predictive
utility in a situation of complex, dispersed, but nonetheless real exercises
of power.
Conspiracy arising in the realm of sociability is also the subject of
Richard Tuck’s “Cartels and Conspiracies,” in which he traces the
strange disappearance of the language of conspiracy from a domain in
which for several centuries it was pivotal: that of cartels and combinations
of capital and labor. He begins with Adam Smith’s famous passage in the
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The Wealth of Nations, where he observed that “people of the same trade
seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conver-
sation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to
raise prices.” In Chapter VIII of Book I, Smith draws a parallel
between the combinations of masters for the purpose of raising prices
and driving down wages, and the “contrary defensive combination of
the workmen,” who may “combine of their own accord to raise the
price of their labour.” Both sorts of combination were, for Smith, a
natural and entirely understandable phenomenon, and he displays sympa-
thy for the combinations of workmen. But combinations of masters and
workers were often perceived, and recognized in law, in very different
ways. Indeed, Smith’s arguments came to form one pole in a succession
of legal cases in which combinations of workers were brought to trial
for conspiring to withhold their labor: it was under conspiracy law that
eighteenth-century attempts to prohibit trade unions were pursued. On
the other side were arguments put forward by Scottish judge John
Burnett in , who maintained that combinations of workmen could
be distinguished from those of masters by means of a distinction
between “natural” and “artificial” combinations. A “natural” combi-
nation referred to communication and coordination for the purpose of
demanding an increase in wages. “But if a number enter into a combination
for this purpose; if, instead of merely communicating with each other, they
form a confederacy, linked together by rules, and pursuing a concerted plan
of action; and if, at the same time, they branch themselves out into sub-
divisions, communicating together as one body, and forming resolutions to
stand by one another at all hazards, it then ceases to be a legal union. It
becomes a dangerous conspiracy” (quoted in Tuck ). A majority of
the judges in an earlier case decided against essentially the same argument,
  Critical Review Vol. , No. 

ruling, as Tuck puts it, that “there could be no straightforward distinction

between a strike and what Smith described as the ‘tacit, but constant and
uniform combination’ which the employers engaged in” (ibid.). In the
light of this and similar decisions, Tuck notes, mainstream political and
economic thought of the nineteenth century recognized a parallel
between combinations of employers and employees.
The trust-busting Sherman Act of  began with the line: “Every
contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy,
in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with
foreign nations, is hereby declared to be illegal” (ibid.). The Sherman
Act did not contain distinctions between types of conspiracy or combi-
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nation, and it was quickly applied against trade unions. Subsequent legis-
lation to exempt unions from the Act, Tuck suggests, had the effect of
shifting the frame within which such combinations were perceived, creat-
ing “a climate of opinion in which the default position legally was that
unions were illegitimate, and could only be permitted through special
measures which perpetually smacked of class privilege to their opponents”
(ibid.). Tuck then briefly sketches one of the key arguments in his Free
Riding (Tuck ), tracing a shift in economic and political thought,
from the s onward, away from Smith’s view that combinations
were “natural,” to the view predominant still in economic and political
thought, that “voluntary collaboration in large groups was not rational
for the individuals concerned, and that cartels or trades unions would
inevitably collapse unless they had strong internal systems of discipline”
(Tuck ). He stresses the novelty of this view: “For the previous
two hundred years it had been taken for granted both by defenders and
opponents of combination that they made sense for their members, and
that left to their own devices people would naturally collaborate in enter-
prises designed to benefit them. But it is hard not to think that the idea
that it is rational not to collaborate made sense precisely because the
legal setting in the United States had rendered the old forms of collabor-
ation impossible, just as in late-nineteenth-century England the freedom
to form combinations led economists to take for granted the rationality of
doing so” (ibid.). This shift in both the legal and intellectual framework
has led, Tuck claims, to the disappearance of the language of conspiracy
from the realm of public discussion of power in economic relations.
And this change, he concludes, has been to our loss: “What the language
of conspiracy presupposed, when it was applied to cartels and combi-
nations, was that the people concerned were agents, fully responsible for
 Moore • Conspiracy Theories in Democratic Politics 

their collective as well as their individual actions” (ibid.). What we cur-

rently have, he suggests, is a denuded conception of agency in collabora-
tive enterprises, felt most keenly of all perhaps in that great collaborative
venture of democratic politics.
In “Hayek, Conspiracy, and Democracy” (Moore ) I also take up
the theme of how conspiracies are imagined within market relations, but I
do so through an exploration of the work of Friedrich Hayek. In particu-
lar, I am interested in the relationship between his radically anti-conspir-
atorial social theory and his profoundly cynical account of democratic
politics. I begin by recounting his famous theory of the spontaneous
emergence and evolution of social order, which, as he repeatedly insists,
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emerges as a result of human actions but corresponds to no individual’s

intentions. If we follow Popper’s definition of the conspiracy theory of
society, Hayek surely represents the anti-conspiracy theory of society.
He insists on the impossibility of intentional agency, direction, and
control in spontaneous social orders such as markets. The realm of demo-
cratic politics, however, forms in Hayek’s work a constant counterpoint to
the spontaneous order of market interactions. But not only does he ana-
lytically distinguish between the “order governed by the impersonal dis-
cipline of the market” and the order “directed by the will of a few
individuals”; he also argues that precisely this tendency to misunderstand
spontaneous order gives rise to the need for force and fraud in the practice
of government.
I introduce the notion of a conspiratorial environment to frame the
idea that the two modes of coordination, designed orders and spontaneous
orders, come with radically different expectations of what sort of behavior
is “natural” to the different domains. Hayek represents a political epistem-
ology characterized by a presumption of innocence in the realm of spon-
taneous order: the burden of proof lies with those who would explain
complex events in terms of the agency of particular individuals and
groups. The default presumption is that outcomes are a product of acci-
dental interactions, not intentional designs. Democracies, by contrast,
are environments that tend always to promote organized deception and
ultimately to collapse into totalitarianism. Further, his antipathy to the
idea of conscious critical public reflection on systems of rules means
that he finds it difficult, within his own theoretical framework, to
account for the possibility of self-correction or incremental improvement
arising within democratic structures, which is why some critics insist that
Hayek has an inherently authoritarian streak.
  Critical Review Vol. , No. 

Hayek, at least in his polemical Road to Serfdom, also signals the danger
of conspiracy within spontaneous order, in the form of private monopolies
and oligopolies; in particular, he notes the danger that monopolies are
vulnerable to state takeover or capture. In his later writings, he tries to
pass off his account of the threat posed by monopolies to a liberal order
as a rhetorical maneuver, and focuses increasingly on the particular
dangers of organized labor. Hayek thus manifests the shift in thought
observed by Tuck, in which combinations of capital owners came to be
seen as natural and to some degree innocent, whereas combinations of
laborers indicate the presence of coercion. He also manifests the shift,
observed by Olmsted () and Boltanski (), among others, that
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the language of conspiracy in the twentieth century has come to focus

largely on the activities of governments, and especially their bureaucracies.
In coming to view monopoly with relative benevolence, Hayek’s work
parallels a broader tendency both in legal practice and economic and
political thought. Yet this is perhaps ironic, for just as in the era of digital
capitalism monopoly is being celebrated as an incentive to innovation by
entrepreneurs claiming Hayekian inspiration (Thiel ), Hayek’s earlier
fear of the vulnerability of monopoly to state capture and control seems
to be borne out dramatically in the relationships between security agencies
and technology firms.
What is the relationship between technocracy and conspiracy? One
version of technocracy, which emerged in the early twentieth century,
involves managing a country on the model of managing a factory; the
technocrats were to be scientists and industrial engineers. This is the
sort of command-and-control technocracy that Hayek scorned.
Another version of technocracy, which involves securing the conditions
for the emergence of spontaneous order, gives a central role to economists
in institutions ranging from independent central banks to regulatory
bodies to the IMF. This is the sort of technocracy of which Hayek
tacitly approved. Lawrence Quill focuses on a third, emerging version
of technocracy, in which information technology is the new central
domain, and the emerging elites are computer programmers and entrepre-
neurs (among whose number, ironically, we find many followers of
Hayek). Drawing on the figurative sense of conspiracy, Quill introduces
the idea of “technological conspiracy,” which refers to “a group of of
individuals possessing a highly developed scientific or technical skill set,
who are engaged in activities that advance their interests at cost to the
interests of society, while simultaneously producing a discourse that
 Moore • Conspiracy Theories in Democratic Politics 

deliberately challenges the conventional wisdom or traditional structures

of power within that society” (Quill ). He then uses the idea of a
“technological conspiracy” to capture the political quality of a “new
scientific elite” (ibid.) and bring the politics back into debates about
technology.
Quill’s central move is to use Auguste Comte to illuminate the char-
acter of the emerging (would-be) technocrats of Silicon Valley.
Comte’s theories involve “sociological and epistemological claims about
the proper role of technical expertise and the function of politics”
(Quill ). He thought that the new conditions created by industrial
and scientific advance demanded a new elite, composed neither of poli-
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ticians nor of spiritual leaders, but capable of functionally substituting

for them. The new system of politics would have three noteworthy fea-
tures. First, it would move away from the model of sovereign power,
aiming to “coordinate the activities of the citizenry rather than order
them about” (ibid.). Underlying this view was an insistence that human
affairs can yield to scientific analysis, and that what we will find beneath
the surface of manifest appearances is not “agency as one might find in
a conspiracy theory, but the absence of it; a design without a designer”
(ibid.). The second feature is that while Comte projected a scientific
elite, his conception of elite rule emphasized the moral dimension.
What must be developed, as Comte puts it, “is a belief in the power of
science as a permanent spiritual basis of the social order” (quoted, ibid.),
which suggests that “technology (and its charismatic leaders) would
come to represent a new kind of religion” (ibid.). Technology, in this
way of thinking, is not a matter of disenchantment but rather a different
kind of enchantment. The third feature is that this would be “open con-
spiracy” (the title of a  book by H. G. Wells). Comte’s scientific elite
“do not collaborate behind closed doors but openly. In fact, the visibility of
this new public—compared to the invisibility of some of its precursors—
was crucial to its propagandizing function” (ibid.). In this combination of
engagement in political discourse combined with positioning themselves
“above the political fray,” the contemporary technologists, Quill con-
cludes, are echoing the technocratic vision put forward by Comte. By
attending to such historical precursors as Comte, he suggests, we can
get a sharper view of the utopian imagination of Silicon Valley.
One of the novel claims in Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent’s
American Conspiracy Theories, reviewed in this issue by Joanne Miller and
Kyle Saunders (), is that accusations of conspiracy over the course
  Critical Review Vol. , No. 

of the twentieth century follow a distinctive partisan pattern: When

Republicans are in office, more of the conspiracy talk comes from the
left, accusing Wall Street, corporations, and right-wing organizations of
secretly pulling the strings of power. When Democrats are in office, con-
spiracy talk comes more from the right and focuses on subversion by com-
munists, unions, and so on. Suspicion of foreigners, government, and the
media is fairly stable, but the balance of conspiracy claims in American
politics seem to shift back and forth according to who is in power.
In their contribution, Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum
explore the relationship of political parties and partisanship to charges of
conspiracy and fears of conspiracy, and they argue that the duty to
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oppose corrosive conspiracy theories is at least in partial tension with

the demands of representation. Muirhead and Rosenblum take as their
prompt the allegations from the spring of  that a U.S. Army exercise
in the Western United States was a rehearsal for an invasion in which the
population would be disarmed and key political leaders jailed. It would
seem that political leaders such as the governor of Texas had a duty,
which he did not fulfill, to dispel such popular delusions, to “speak
truth to conspiracy.” If many of the emblematic conspiracy theories cir-
culating in advanced democracies are marginal, at least part of the
reason is that political leaders refrain from promoting them. While it is
possible to find people who believe America is the victim of an elaborate
Jewish plot, it is difficult—in stark contrast with Nazi Germany or parts of
the Middle East today—to find respectable political leaders who will
endorse or promote such claims. The current marginality of such
beliefs is, in effect, at least partly a product of political leadership. But
what happens when political leaders promote conspiratorial fears, or are
complicit through their silence when their supporters indulge in propa-
gating ungrounded claims of conspiracy?
Muirhead and Rosenblum argue that the duty of leaders to oppose
certain conspiracy claims is complicated by the fact that partisan represen-
tatives also need to “reason with” conspiratorial fears. A further compli-
cation is that the credibility of partisan elites to rebut conspiracy
theories depends on a trust that itself is built, at least in part, by demon-
strating a “partisan connection” to their followers. This involves listening
to and responding to constituents, associations, supporters, and various
associations; and it also, importantly, often entails “accommodating
popular perceptions of conspiracy” (Muirhead and Rosenblum
). When, the authors ask, does “maintain[ing] a connection to
 Moore • Conspiracy Theories in Democratic Politics 

the street” become “cynical deference to . . . arrant suspicions” or

“pandering to and exploiting popular fears” (ibid.)? To what extent
are such accusations separable from ultimately valuable practices of par-
tisan political argument, and when do they represent a degradation of
healthy “regulated rivalry” into a corrosive and dangerous politics of
fear? In short: How are partisan leaders supposed to represent conspi-
racy theorists while being responsible to the truth?
Of all the contributions to this issue, Muirhead and Rosenblum most
directly address the relationships of conspiracy theories to democratic
politics. However, they avoid the tendency, common to the positive
approaches discussed above, of seeking either implicitly or explicitly to
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separate out true from false or warranted from unwarranted conspiracy

theories. “On a philosophic level,” they rightly observe, “no analytic
distinction can be made to identify which conspiracy theories might be
the basis of justified belief, and which are crazy or absurd” (ibid.). They
do not claim that there are no conspiracy theories that prove to be unwar-
ranted; far from it. But they shift the burden of responsibility for drawing
the line from the reflections of philosophers to the situated judgments of
political actors. And they put forward criteria that might guide such judg-
ment. They single out three elements in the “conspiracist repertoire” that
go beyond the partisan connection and demand of political leaders that
they directly rebut the fears of their followers. These are, first, theories
fueled by hatred of minority groups, theories that are more “instruments
of violence” than “modes of explanation” (ibid.), and that can, at the very
least, lead to the threatened minorities being intimidated into withdraw-
ing from political life. The second sort of claim that goes too far is when
parties or partisan officials are charged with treason, and thus appear to be
criminal conspirators. Such charges, like the first set, are beyond the pale
insofar as they have the effect of leading to actions such as bans on parties
or other measures that destroy their targets’ capacity to compete in future
democratic competition. The regulated rivalry of democratic partisanship
clearly allows the undermining of the ideas and claims of one’s opponents,
but it differs, the authors insist, from “delegitimizing the opposition”
(ibid.). The third sort of case where partisan leaders have a duty to resist
charges of conspiracy is when those charges involve a distrust that
extends to non-partisan authorities, and in particular expert authorities.
Such distrust undermines the conduits of reliable information that are
necessary for regulating for the common good. It is incumbent on partisan
leaders to communicate to their followers that “the same Center for
  Critical Review Vol. , No. 

Disease Control that lied in the Tuskegee experiments is not lying when it
publicizes proof that vaccines do not cause autism” (ibid.). There are good
reasons to be skeptical of experts empowered by governmental insti-
tutions. But “when conspiratorial thinking goes further and delegitimates
all expert authority, it corrodes democratic self-government” (ibid.).

* * *

Taken together, these articles open up the theme of conspiracy in con-

temporary political theory. They trace its particular forms and absences
in thinking about parties and partisan politics, markets, technologies,
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and networks; they attend to the spectrum of ways in which agents can
be connected, ranging from the narrow conspiracy of the smoky room
through forms of collusion and complicity, to structural bias and ideology;
and they broaden the normative focus from the truth or warrantedness of
conspiracy theories and the psychological categories of delusion and para-
noia, to the distinctive goods of democratic politics, of inclusion, argu-
mentation, and decision. Rather than treat conspiracy theories as simply
a footnote to a long line of liberal anxieties about popular ignorance,
these contributions prompt us to ask where, when, and how people
have tended to see conspiracy and worry about conspiracy, and where
they have not, heightening our sense of the peculiarity and contingency
of apparently natural ways of thinking about power in modern
democracies. In doing so, these essays also show the value of political
theory itself.

NOTES

. Although the term “conspiracy theory” itself has a history reaching back to late
nineteenth century crime reports in American newspapers (McKenzie-McHarg
), the idea of conspiracy theory as a distinctive problem of public opinion is
usually located in the mid-twentieth century (Knight ; Butter ).
. I thank Hugo Drochon for bringing this to my attention.
. For a more exhaustive and differentiated survey of current approaches to the
problem of conspiracy theory, see Knight .
. Consider Van Jones, who had to resign his post as adviser to the head of the White
House’s Council on Environmental Quality in July  following rumors (which
he denied) that he had signed a petition calling for investigations into the claim that
the Bush administration was complicit in the / attacks.
 Moore • Conspiracy Theories in Democratic Politics 

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