Today conspiracy theories exist in all cultures and societies. While there are precursors in antiquity, there is evidence that their modern form emerged during the transition from the Early Modern period to the Enlightenment. 1 Conspiracy theory research, by contrast, is a relatively new phenomenon. While historians occasionally touched upon the subject already during the first decades of the twentieth century, "conspiracy theory" emerged as an identifiable category of scholarly discourse and

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... object of concern only during the second half, not least becauseexcept for a few isolated examples-the very label did not enter wide circulation until that time. 2 This chapter outlines the history of academic research on conspiracy theories in English. We begin with an account of early studies conducted in various disciplines which led to Richard Hofstadter's famous conceptualization of conspiracy theorizing as the manifestation of a "paranoid style" in the 1960s-a conceptualization that has both inspired and impeded research. 3 We then proceed systematically rather than chronologically, moving from disciplines that have not entirely overcome the pathologizing approach to conspiracy theories to those that have adopted alternative approaches. Accordingly, the second section is dedicated to studies in social psychology and political science. Scholars from these disciplines largely share Hofstadter's concern about conspiracy theories, but they have increasingly employed quantitative methods to pin down the factors that lead people to believe in conspiracy theories or to engage in underlying conspiracy thinking. The third section discusses the work of analytical philosophers, who have sought to provide more precise definitions of the term and to distinguish between warranted and unwarranted theories. The final section is devoted to the "cultural turn" in conspiracy theory research, whose proponents have been challenging the The early history of conspiracy theory research has been convincingly related by Katharina Thalmann, whose account builds on and expands earlier work by Jack Bratich and Mark Fenster. 4 According to Thalmann, scholarly interest in the phenomenon emerged during the 1930s and 1940s under the influence of the two world wars and the rise of totalitarianism. 5 Three different strands are discernible in the initial phase. Political psychologists like Harold Lasswell and Theodor Adorno identified personality types particularly prone to what they considered the irrational practice of conspiracy theorizing, "the agitator" in Lasswell and "the authoritarian personality" in Adorno. 6 While they thus focused on individual traits and psychological causes, sociologists Leo Loewenthal and Norbert Guterman related belief in conspiracy theories to the complexities of modernization and the emergence of mass societies. 7 Anticipating the work of cultural studies scholars fifty years later, in 1949 Loewenthal and Guterman regarded "conspiracy theorizing [as] a meaning-making cultural practice that was worth analyzing and studying." 8 owever, neither the political psychologists nor the sociologists came up with a label for the phenomenon they were studying. This task fell to Karl Popper, a historian of science, who described in the late 1940s what he called the conspiracy theory of society as an utterly simplistic and, more importantly, unscientific way of understanding social relations, which had emerged as a reaction and in opposition to the Enlightenment. 9 Although Popper acknowledged that Marx himself was careful to distance himself from what would later be called conspiracy theories, so-called Vulgar Marxism (but also other forms of "totalitarian" thinking such as Nazism) fell into the trap of attributing historical causation to conspiracies of, say, the ruling class or capital itself. If, for Popper, these simplistic forms of historicism committed the intellectual error of ascribing agency to impersonal forces, then the opposite tendency-blaming every unfortunate turn of events on an intentional conspiracy of powerful individuals behind the scenes-was equally guilty of misunderstanding how history works. Popper insisted that the kind of large-scale, coordinated action imagined by conspiracy theorists was impossible because of the inevitability of unintended consequences in complex societies. History, for Popper, should more properly be thought of as the product of an invisible hand (in Adam Smith's term) than a hidden hand.