The ‘totalitarian’ metapolitics of counter-conspiracy in neoliberal times

Description

As the intellectual historian Nicolas Guilhot (2022) has noted, liberal political theorists have tended to imagine conspiracy (theory) to be the sinister obverse of liberal democracy. Thus Hannah Arendt – building on Alexandre Koyré’s short essay on ‘the modern lie’, written in exile from exile, in New York, in 1943 – presented totalitarian movements as ‘conspiracies in broad daylight’ in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). For Arendt, Nazism began as a reaction against the fiction of a conspiracy of Jewish influence – as a counter-conspiracy, a metapolitical move implying the suspension of democratic norms – yet paradoxically came to model itself ‘more or less consciously’ on the example of the secret society in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In this paper, I return to Arendt and Koyré, as well as to Maurice Joly’s Dialogue (1864), in light of Guilhot’s problematizing reading and reconsider Arendt’s account in the context of today’s increasingly securitarian neoliberal capitalist system. Is the ‘totalitarian’ force of counter-conspiracy being reinvented and redeployed by neoliberalism in its anxious discourse around conspiracy theory and disinformation? To what extent does ‘the epidemiological turn’, whereby dis/misinformation and conspiracy theory are dramatized in highly emotive terms as diseases of the demos, draw on an implicitly totalitarian political imaginary of parasitism and contagion? Finally, I discuss Guilhot’s provocative suggestion that anti-populism may be a defining super-conspiracy theory of (neo)liberal democracy and return to Jacques Rancière’s contentious view of conspiracy theory in his essay on the end of the first Trump presidency, ‘The Fools and the Wise’ (2021).

Period	11 Sept 2026
Event title	The Epidemiological Turn: Critical Approaches to Conspiracy Theory and Mis/Disinformation Discourse
Event type	Workshop
Location	Cork, IrelandShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International