Bust of Ziya Gökalp, founding father of Turkish sociology, Diyarbakir. Wikicommons/Cemaliamec.Some rights reserved.Conspiracy theories proliferate about many significant events ranging from global warming to assassinations and influence public opinion. For example, the conspiratorial perspective on Jews constitutes the backbone of anti-Semitic ideology. Conspiracy theories have not attracted sufficient attention, basically because a strong intellectual current sees conspiracy theories as deluded accounts that divert people’s attention from the reality.
This perspective tends to label conspiracy theories as products of political extremism and an enemy of democracy. Richard Hofstadter (1965) described conspiracy theories as a ‘paranoid style’: ‘The distinguishing thing about the paranoid style is not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but that they regard a "vast" or "gigantic" conspiracy as the motive force in historical events.’ Hofstadter pities conspiracy theorists as double sufferers, troubled not only by the real world but also his fantasies.
