Conspiracy Culture, Blame Culture, and Rationalisation

Abstract

This paper outlines an approach to conspiracy culture that attempts to resolve the conundrum posed by the parallel logics of conspiracy and sociological theorising, without reducing the former to an irrational response to hidden social forces. Rather, from a re-crafting of Weber's rationalisation thesis as an analysis of the developmental logic of theories of suffering, it argues that conspiracy culture is an outcome of the means of moral accounting, or blame attribution, that inform mundane reasoning in modernity, as also are the human sciences. As part of this, the paper sketches a tentative framework of moral accounting in relation to the notion of ‘blame culture’ based in part on a distinction between a culture of blaming and the blaming of culture. This is used to argue that there is nothing irrational about conspiracy culture – or at least no more so than there is about sociology.