Niewidoczny korzeń.
Invisible Root.

On the Contemporary “Culture of Conspiracy”

Summary/Abstract: The article describes the main research problems that arise from today’s “culture of secrecy” (a term introduced by Peter Knight). These reflections are largely drawn from two books – the anthology The structure of conspiracy theories, containing a selection of the most important twentieth-century academic approaches to the problem, selected and commented on by the sociologist Franciszek Czech, and Czech’s Conspiracy narratives and metanarratives. The first part of the article is a broad, thematically organised commentary on the theories presented in the anthology, while the second part presents a sociological panorama of contemporary Polish conspiracy theories (in particular, the Smolensk assassination theory). Czech takes a position similar to revisionist conspiracy theories, making use of the interdisciplinary tools of cultural studies. His methodological orientation requires him to take a number of important decisions, such as rejecting the assumption that conspiracy theories are generally false and harmful, and focusing attention on narrative patterns, rather than on the more traditional psychology of conspiracism, based on the concepts of a “paranoic style” or a “conspiratorial mentality.”

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