American political scientist Daniel Pipes on the history of conspiracy — the tendency to attribute to any group a conspiracy with malicious intent.
It turns out that the phobia of conspiracies was born in the era of the Crusades, was at its peak between the French Revolution and World War II, and is now gradually fading away. This phobia is cherished mainly by Europeans and Americans, and secret societies (from the Templars and Freemasons to the Ku Klux Klan) are among the main suspects. Moreover, both of them are suspected of approximately the same thing: in attempts at mass poisonings and coup d’état, in corrupting the youth and manipulating public consciousness. Considering the «conspiracy theory» as a whole direction of social thought, the author convincingly shows the inconsistency of conspiracy thinking in any historical era.
New chronograph, 336 p.