Critical theory and the traps of conspiracy thinking

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 33, Issue 7, 2007, Pages 787-801

  Heins, Volker ^a  

^a MCGILL UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

alienation; conspiracy; critical theory; Franz Neumann; Max Horkheimer; rackets; Theodor Adorno

Indexed keywords

EID: 51249151022     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453707081675     Document Type: Article

References (61)

1. Robert Goldberg has shown how the institutional failure of the security services in the run-up to the attack was itself a significant factor in fostering the mushrooming of conspiratorial interpretations of the events in the context of conflicts among American elites, and that these interpretations then triggered an upward surge of paranoia and conspiracy theories. See Robert Alan Goldberg, ‘“Who Profited from the Crime?” Intelligence Failure, Conspiracy Theories and the Case of September 11’, Intelligence and National Security 19 (2004): 249–61.
2. See Joseph Nasr, ‘Egyptian Paper: Israel-India Nuke Test Caused Tsunami’, The Jerusalem Post, 6 January 2005 (online edn).
3. See, for example, Hadassa Ben-Itto, The Lie That Wouldn't Die: The Protocols of The Elders of Zion (Edgware, London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2005).
4. Daniel Pipes, Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From (New York: Free Press, 1997), p. 21.
5. See Hannah Arendt, Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft (Munich: Piper, 1986[1951]), pp. 546–74.
6. See Thomas E. Kaiser, ‘From the Austrian Committee to the Foreign Plot: Marie-Antoinette, Austrophobia, and the Terror’, French Historical Studies 26 (2003): 579–617.
7. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Knopf, 1965).
8. For more on this, see Volker Heins, ‘Civil Society's Barbarisms’, European Journal of Social Theory 7(4) (2004): 499–517.
9. See, for example, Donald A. Ritchie, ‘Are You Now or Have You Ever Been? Opening the Records of the McCarthy Investigations’, Journal of Government Information 30 (2004): 463–9.
10. Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
11. Heinrich Popitz, Phänomene der Macht (Tübingen: Mohr, 1992), p. 51.
12. Mark Featherstone, ‘The Obscure Politics of Conspiracy Theory’, in Jane Parish and Martin Parker (eds) The Age of Anxiety: Conspiracy Theory and the Human Sciences (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 31.
13. See Andrew Strombeck, None Dare Call It Masculinity: The Subject of Post-Kennedy Conspiracy Theory, PhD thesis (University of California at Davis, 2003).
14. Showalter, Hystories, p. 7.
15. Featherstone, ‘The Obscure Politics of Conspiracy Theory’, p. 31.
16. See Sherrilyn Roush, Tracking Truth: Knowledge, Evidence, and Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005).
17. See also Steve Clarke, ‘Conspiracy Theories and Conspiracy Theorizing’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences 32 (2002): 131–50.
18. Lee Basham, ‘Malevolent Global Conspiracy’, Journal of Social Philosophy 34(1) (2003): 91–103.
19. See, for example, Gianfranco Bettin and Maurizio Dianese, La strage. Piazza Fontana, verità e memoria (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1999).
20. Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003);
21. David Satter, Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).
22. Jan Bondeson, Blood on the Snow: The Killing of Olof Palme (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).
23. Franz L. Neumann, ‘Anxiety and Politics’, in The Democratic and the Authoritarian State: Essays in Political and Legal Theory, ed. Herbert Marcuse (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957), p. 284.
24. See Jodi Dean, ‘Theorizing Conspiracy Theory’, Theory and Event 4(3) (2000): 13–14.
25. Lawrence M. Solan and Peter M. Tiersma, Speaking of Crime: The Language of Criminal Justice (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2005), p. 190.
26. See Jeffrey C. Alexander, ‘Culture and Political Crisis: “Watergate” and Durkheimian Sociology’, in J. C. Alexander (ed.) Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 187–224.
27. See Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 3–4.
28. See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. E. Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). Social historians locate the origins of rackets in the heterogeneous economy of the big cities of the early 20th century in which the waves of immigrants played a key role. In cities such as Chicago, artisans, small shopkeepers, building workers, tailors, etc., formed associations that functioned like private governments. They raised taxes, enforced their own rules and exerted influence through their multifarious connections. From the very outset, the concept ‘racketeering’ that arose in the 1920s combined forms of collective self-organization with elements of gangster criminality.
29. For a fascinating account, see Andrew Wender Cohen, The Racketeer's Progress: Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern American Economy, 1900–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
30. Max Horkheimer, ‘Die Rackets und der Geist’, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 12, Nachgelassene Schriften 1931–1949 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1985), p. 287.
31. Max Horkheimer, ‘Herrschende Klasse, die von Rackets beherrschte Klasse und die Rolle der Fachleute’, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 14, Nachgelassene Schriften 1949–1972 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1988), p. 334.
32. See Gianfranco Poggi, Calvinism and the Capitalist Spirit: Max Weber's Protestant Ethic (London: Macmillan, 1983), ch. 8.
33. Charles Tilly, ‘War Making and State Making as Organized Crime’, in Peter Evans et al. (eds) Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 169–91.
34. Horkheimer, ‘Herrschende Klasse’, p. 335.
35. Horkheimer, ‘Theorie der Rackets’, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 14, p. 340.
36. Max Horkheimer, ‘Fachmann, Führer und die Vernunft’, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 14, p. 310.
37. Max Horkheimer, ‘Der Fachmann’, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 14, p. 359.
38. Max Horkheimer, ‘Der internationale Faschismus’, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 14, pp. 310–11.
39. See John S. Nelson, ‘Conspiracy as a Hollywood Trope for System’, Political Communication 20 (2003): 499–503.
40. Max Horkheimer, ‘Über die Wahrheit [II]’, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 14, p. 265.
41. Contrast this with the apt description of the ‘paranoiac’ in Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 156–7.
42. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Curious Realist: On Siegfried Kracauer’, New German Critique 54 (1991[1965]): 162 (159–79).
43. This was one of the central points of dispute in the debate between Horkheimer and Otto Neurath, who was wrongly labeled a ‘positivist’. See John O'Neill and Thomas Uebel, ‘Horkheimer and Neurath: Restarting a Disrupted Debate’, European Journal of Philosophy 12 (2004): 77–105.
44. Maeve Cooke, ‘Redeeming Redemption: the Utopian Dimension of Critical Social Theory’, Philosophy & Social Criticism 30(4) (2004): 422 (413–29).
45. See Neumann, ‘Anxiety and Politics’.
46. Otto Kirchheimer, ‘In Quest of Sovereignty’, Journal of Politics 6 (May 1944): 161–2.
47. The distinction between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ circles of the Frankfurt School has been introduced by Axel Honneth, ‘Critical Theory’, in The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy, ed. C. W. Wright (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), pp. 61–91. However, Honneth neglects the fact that social ‘groups’ are paramount in the thought of both circles, who differ only with respect to their susceptibility to conspiracy thinking.
48. Both these aspects have been meticulously elaborated in Rahel Jaeggi, Entfremdung: Zur Aktualität eines sozialphilosophischen Problems (Frankfurt: Campus, 2005).
49. Neumann, ‘Anxiety and Politics’, p. 288 284–5, 280 290.
50. See the preface to the first edition of his Behemoth in Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933–1944, 2nd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944), p. x.
51. Horkheimer, ‘Fachmann, Führer und die Vernunft’, p. 310.
52. Arthur J. Vidich and Stanford M. Lyman, American Sociology: Worldly Rejections of Religion and Their Directions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1985), p. 281.
53. Horkheimer, ‘Über die Wahrheit [II]’, p. 265.
54. See Axel Honneth, ‘Organized Self-Realization: Some Paradoxes of Individualization’, European Journal of Social Theory 7(4) (2004): 469 (463–78).
55. See Murray S. Davis, ‘That's Interesting! Towards a Phenomenology of Sociology and a Sociology of Phenomenology’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences 1 (1971): 309–44.
56. Theodor W. Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture, ed. S. Crook (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 48.
57. On this distinction, see Catherine Fieschi and Paul Heywood, ‘Trust, Cynicism and Populist Anti-politics’, Journal of Political Ideologies 9(3) (2004): 289–309.
58. Here I disagree with Basham, ‘Malevolent Global Conspiracy’, p. 97.
59. See Howard Kurtz, ‘Would Deep Throat Be a Hero in 2005?’, Washington Post, 1 June 2005 (online edn).
60. On the emergence of truth-telling ‘heroes’ during the instance of Watergate, see also Alexander, ‘Culture and Political Crisis’, pp. 197–210.
61. George F. Kennan, ‘Morality and Foreign Policy’, Foreign Affairs 64 (1985/6): 214 (205–18).