ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how sociology and social theory have addressed conspiracy theories. It considers how conspiracy theories have been understood as either alternative sociological theories or misguided social science, and shows how sociology tends to conceptualise conspiracy theory. Precisely from a Marxist perspective, Fredric Jameson, who famously deemed conspiracy ‘the poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age’, located the seedbed of conspiracy theorising in the shift from the discourse of social science to ideology. Conspiracy theories can be regarded as sets of ideas and beliefs. However private and deeply personal these may be, ideas and beliefs have a social dimension that is essential to any sociological conception of conspiracy theories. One of the most influential sociological examinations of the usage of the labels ‘conspiracy theory’ and ‘conspiracy theorist’ as tools for the exclusion of deviant ideas is G. Husting and M. Orr’s 2007 article ‘Dangerous Machinery’.
