Academic literature on conspiracy theories is limited, but there are enough books on the market to see how scholars have approached the subject — that is, as the “relic of a populist, right wing, political tradition, which refuses to go awa…———. New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998.
Hirstein, William. Brain Fiction: Self-Deception and the Riddle of Confabulation. Cambridge, MA: MIT …[^42]: Jovan Byford, Conspiracy Theories: A Critical Introduction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 19. For an academic overview of conspiracy theories see Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary …
Richard Hofstadter
historian · 3 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Hofstadter is foundational to modern scholarly frameworks for understanding conspiracy thinking, particularly as a phenomenon rooted in populist and right-wing political traditions. The course readings invoke him to ground their analysis of how conspiracy theories function as a cultural and epistemic problem—establishing the intellectual baseline from which contemporary theories of networked misinformation and paranoid systems diverge. His work enables the course to historicize the relationship between folk belief, institutional distrust, and the technological amplification of conspiratorial thinking in algorithmic systems.
Mentioned in 1 reading
Appears alongside
People mentioned in the same passages — sorted by co-occurrence weight.
Cary Nelson 2Fredric Jameson 2Lawrence Grossberg 2Peter Knight 2Timothy Melley 2Daniel Pipes 2David Brion Davis 2Michael Barkun 2Alex Jones 1Catherine Malabou 1Cynthia Sue Larson 1Daniel L. Schacter 1David Ingvar 1Elaine Scarry 1Endel Tulving 1George M. Marsden 1Heléne Lööw 1Jeffrey Kaplan 1John Lamb Lash 1Joseph E. LeDoux 1Kevin Kelly 1Mack Lamoureux 1Martin Lepage 1William Hirstein 1Aaron John Gulyas 1Jovan Byford 1Mark Fenster 1John Fitzgerald Kennedy 1Karl Popper 1