Conspiracy and Democracy

Speaker: Dr Keith Kahn-Harris - Sociologist and writer The term 'denialism' has come to be applied to a cluster of 'alternative' forms of knowledge, including Holocaust denial, global warming denial, anti-vaxxers, 911 conspiracism, creationism and more. In my forthcoming book Denial: The Unspeakable Truth, I argue that denialism arose in modernity as a result of a process in which, post-enlightenment, certain desires and political projects were rendered 'unspeakable' and impossible to legitimate publicly. Denialism is therefore a covert forms of advocating for and legitimating certain courses of action and ways of being in the world. The 'alternative' to denialism is , therefore, a dystopian prospect; a world in which the unspeakable becomes speakable again. This alternative is more than a hypothetical possibility. There are signs of a transition occurring from denialism to 'post-denialism'. Post-denialism, embodied in the discourse of Donald Trump, eschews the masquerade of science and scholarship that defines denialism, in favour of a visceral kind of quasi-acknowledgement of that which is denied. This may signal a weakening of the boundaries of the speakable and a concomitant shift in the language of political possibility. Dr Keith Kahn-Harris is a sociologist and writer. He is a senior lecturer at Leo Baeck College an associate lecturer at Birkbeck College, and a Fellow of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research. The talk will be followed by a drinks reception in the Alison Richard Building foyer. This event is being hosted by the Conspiracy & Democracy research project, a five-year project funded by The Leverhulme Trust and based at CRASSH. For further details about the event, please contact the project administrator, Rachael Taylor, here.

A public lecture with Scott Radnitz (University of Washington) Abstract This talk asks how conspiracy theories operate in partially democratic or non-democratic settings. Elites in these political systems are believed to strategically use conspiracies to distract, confound, and demobilize the public, yet cynical citizens often independently suspect their own leaders of being complicit in conspiracies. Conspiracy theories in weakly institutionalized societies thus highlight a paradox of political trust: Conspiracy belief involves both credulousness (toward the claimant) and suspicion (of the putative villain). This analysis uses original surveys of Georgia and Kazakhstan to understand how people reconcile official conspiracy claims with distrust of the state. Survey experiments test how they weigh official claims or denials against preexisting biases in determining culpability, and whether exposure to official conspiracy claims motivates pro-regime or repressive policy preferences. The results suggest that people are influenced more by commonsense judgments than elite claims about conspiracy, and that conspiratorial rhetoric does not necessarily translate into political support. Biography Scott Radnitz is Associate Professor in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies and Director of the Ellison Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies at the University of Washington. He does research on the post-Soviet region, covering topics such as protests, authoritarianism, informal networks, and identity. His book, Weapons of the Wealthy: Predatory Regimes and Elite-Led Protests in Central Asia, was published by Cornell University Press in 2010. Articles have appeared in journals including Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Democracy, Studies in Comparative International Development, and Post-Soviet Affairs. Policy commentary has appeared in Foreign Policy, The National Interest, Slate, and the Monkey Cage/Washington Post blog. He is currently writing a book on the political uses of conspiracy theories in the post-Soviet region. This event is open to all and will be followed by a wine reception. No registration required. This is part of a series of public talks from the Leverhulme-funded project Conspiracy and Democracy. More information at http://www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org/. Enquiries - conspiracy@crassh.cam.ac.uk

A public lecture with Reza Zia-Ebrahimi (King's College London) Abstract Zia-Ebrahimi builds on recent comparative research on antisemitism and Islamophobia to argue that the two display similar dynamics in representing their target population as a different and antagonistic race (a process referred to as ‘racialization’). His research suggests that conspiracy theories of the ‘world Jewish conspiracy’ type, and their Islamophobic equivalent, the ‘Islamisation of Europe’ type, are powerful enablers of racialization, something that the literature has so far neglected. To show the similar dynamics of what he calls ‘conspiratorial racialization’, Zia-Ebrahimi provides a textual comparison between The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903) and Eurabia: The Euro-Arab axis (2005). Biography Reza Zia-Ebrahimi is a Senior Lecturer in History at King’s College London. His work is situated at the juncture between global intellectual history and ethnic studies. He has worked on the development of dislocative nationalism in Iran in the period 1860-1979, focusing on the hybridisation of European ideas of nation and race by Iranian intellectuals. Currently, his research centres on a parallel study of antisemitism and Islamophobia from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. The incidence of conspiracy thinking on strategies of racialisation is at the heart of this new research agenda. This event is open to all and will be followed by a wine reception. No registration required. This is part of a series of public talks from the Leverhulme-funded project Conspiracy and Democracy. More information at http://www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org/. Enquiries - conspiracy@crassh.cam.ac.uk

A public lecture with Ilya Yablokov (University of Leeds) This is part of a series of public talks from the Leverhulme-funded project Conspiracy and Democracy. More information at http://www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org/.

A public lecture with Dr Sophia Rosenfeld (University of Pennsylvania)

A public lecture with Dr Ieva Jusionyte (Harvard University) Abstract Guns and Mosquitoes: How Media Makes Emergency and Routine on the Argentine Border Drawing from ethnographic research with news journalists in the tri-border area of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, this talk will examine the role of the media in producing, circulating, and contesting conspiracy narratives. From the 1990s, when securitization and militarization went hand-in-hand with sensationalist portrayals of the region as a haven of organized crime and terrorism, to the panics caused by the spread of tropical disease–first yellow fever, then dengue–over a decade later, local journalists in towns along the Argentina’s northern edge have remained mostly silent. Off the record, the media in the Province of Misiones has been fiercely criticizing the complicity of major Argentine news outlets in vilifying the border area–a process, which they saw as being driven by the interests of political and economic elites in Buenos Aires as well as in Washington, D.C. In this talk, I will discuss the disagreements about the events and their interpretations between local, national, and global media as a lens through which to understand social anxieties and insecurities in a historically marginalized and criminalized border region.

A public lecture with Ute Caumanns (University of Düsseldorf) Abstract The lecture considers the relevance of visuality and visual sources in conspiracy theory research. It argues that conspiracy theories are meant to be disseminated amongst a given public. To achieve this, they are communicated not only through written texts, but also with the help of speech and visualization. It is open to question, whether graphic images and visual representation can contribute to a chronological classification of conspiracy theory including pre-modern history. The presentation focusses on post-war Eastern Europe, where to – following the Moscow Purge Trials of the late 1930s – the model of Stalinist show trials was transferred. Against the background of historical case studies from Stalinist Czechoslovakia, Poland and Eastern Germany, show trials are presented as performative acts as well as (multi)media events. Onstage, they offer an elaborate and refined narrative – in order to destroy someone politically and morally by means of fabricated recriminations, but also as a means to reinterpret history in conspiratorial terms. Biography Ute Caumanns teaches History at the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Germany (Dep. of History and Cultures in Eastern Europe). She holds a PhD in East European History from the University of Düsseldorf. For her dissertation she focused on political Catholicism in interwar Poland analysing the Jesuit press. Between 1996 and 2000 she was Researcher at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw, working on a case study on Public Health in the Russian Part of partitioned Poland, 1815-1915. Since 1999 she focuses also on conspiracy theories (Verschwörungstheorien. Anthropologische Konstanten – historische Varianten, coed. Mathias Niendorf, Osnabrück 2001; „Der Teufel in Rot. Trockij und die Ikonographie des „jüdischen Bolschewismus“ im polnisch-sowjetischen Krieg, 1919/1920“ in: zeitenblicke 10, 2 [22.12.2011], online available at http://www.zeitenblicke.de/2011/2/Caumanns/index_html [last access 04/01/2017]; Wer zog die Drähte? Verschwörungstheorien im Bild, coed. Lars Gronau, Christian Lange, Tim Mörsch, Düsseldorf 2012). Her present project on show trials in East Central Europe deals with conspiratorial narrative, performative and media aspects (“Der Feind im Innern. Stalinistische Schauprozesse und Verschwörungsdenken im Kalten Krieg“ in INDES. Zeitschrift für Politik und Gesellschaft 2015, 4, 80-87; „Verschwörungsdenken in der politischen Führung Polens im Kalten Krieg. Bierut, Berman, Werfel und der ‚Prozess der Generäle’“ in Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung 2016, 181-194). In 2014/2015 she was heading the student project Schauprozesse. Inszenierung und Medialisierung politischer Justiz in Osteuropa, online-exhibition available December 2015-December 2018 at http://www.schauprozesse.de.

A public lecture with Dr Federico Finchelstein (The New School, New York). Abstract Dr Finchelstein will analyze the history and memories of the Dirty War in Argentina after 1983. He will especially focus on the 'dictatorial memories' of the right and the extreme right. These memories were essentially defined by its conspiratorial takes on the recent history of violence in the country. Dr Finchelstein will stress how transnational and transcontextual histories of genocide played a key in first defining the ideology of the perpetrators during the Dirty War and then in the post-dictatorial conspiratorial reformulations of the past. Biography Professor Finchelstein is the author of five books on fascism, populism, Dirty Wars, the Holocaust and Jewish history in Latin America and Europe. His forthcoming book is: From Fascism to Populism in History (University of California Press, 2017). His last book, The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War (2014), focuses on the theory and practice of the fascist idea throughout the twentieth century, analyzing the connections between fascism and the Holocaust, antisemitism, and the military junta's practices of torture and state violence, with its networks of concentration camps and extermination. His previous book, Transatlantic Fascism (2010), studies the global connections between Italian and Argentine fascism.More than 50 academic articles and reviews by Mr. Finchelstein, on subjects including fascism, Latin American, American and European populism, genocide, and anti-Semitism, have been published in books and specialized peer-reviewed journals in a number of languages. He has been a contributor to major American, European, and Latin American newspapers and news media, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Politico, Reuters, Mediapart (France), El Diario (NYC) Clarin (Argentina) and Folha de S.Paulo (Brazil).

A public lecture with Dr James Harris (University of Leeds). Abstract Between the winter of 1936 and the autumn of 1938, approximately three quarters of a million Soviet citizens were subject to summary execution. More than a million others were sentenced to lengthy terms in labour camps. Commonly known as 'Stalin's Great Terror', it is also among the most misunderstood moments in the history of the twentieth century. The Terror gutted the ranks of factory directors and engineers after three years in which all major plan targets were met. It raged through the armed forces on the eve of the Nazi invasion. The wholesale slaughter of party and state officials was in danger of making the Soviet state ungovernable. The majority of these victims of state repression in this period were accused of participating in counter-revolutionary conspiracies. Almost without exception, there was no substance to the claims and no material evidence to support them. By the time the terror was brought to a close, most of its victims were ordinary Soviet citizens for whom 'counter-revolution' was an unfathomable abstraction. In short, the Terror was wholly destructive, not merely in terms of the incalculable human cost, but also in terms of the interests of the Soviet leaders, principally Joseph Stalin, who directed and managed it. The Great Fear presents a new and original explanation of the Stalin's Terror based on intelligence materials in Russian archives. It shows how Soviet leaders developed a grossly exaggerated fear of conspiracy and foreign invasion and lashed out at enemies largely of their own making. Biography James Harris is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Leeds. He is the author of The Great Urals: Regionalism and the Evolution of the Soviet System (1999) and co-author (with Sarah Davies) of Stalin's World: Dictating the Soviet Order (2015). He co-edited (with Sarah Davies) Stalin: A New History (2005), and edited Anatomy of Terror: Political Violence under Stalin (2013). He is currently writing a book on the origins of the Communist dictatorship

A public lecture by Professor Sir Richard Evans. Abstract After Napoleon's final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, the conservative regimes of the Restoration quickly developed a paranoid suspicion of conspiracies which, they feared, were being hatched to overthrow them. For their part, democrats across Europe formed secret societies like the carbonari, while groups of junior army officers from Spain to Russia plotted to remove Restoration governments and drive the programme of the French Revolution forward. This lecture asks why the politics of the 1820s were so dominated by conspiracy, and attempts to fit the dynamics of plot and counter-plot into the larger framework of the history of conspiracies and conspiracy theories in the modern age. Biography Sir Richard Evans FBA is Regius Professor Emeritus of History and President of Wolfson College at the University of Cambridge. He is Principal Investigator in the Leverhulme Programme Grant 'Conspiracy and Democrary' at CRASSH. His latest book, 'The Politics of Power: Europe 1815-1914', will be published by Penguin Books on 1 September 2016.

A public lecture by Dr Iain Lauchlan (University of Edinburgh) Abstract This paper investigates the fall of “Iron Felix” Dzerzhinsky. He was the creator of the Soviet secret police, Lenin’s fearsome enforcer and the man who many thought represented the last serious impediment to Stalin’s seizure of power. His death in the Kremlin in July 1926 had all the elements of a great theatrical production: timely relevance to the mood of the age, a grand location, and a stellar cast. In fact many observers found it difficult to believe that such a meaningful pattern of events could have been woven by accident alone and suspected that some hidden artist was spinning the web. This talk will explore the conspiracies and conspiracy theories surrounding Dzerzhinsky’s demise, in doing so it seeks to ascertain the true cause of his death and its significance. Biography Iain Lauchlan received his BA (1993) and PhD (1998) from the University of Leeds. His PhD thesis and first book (‘Russian Hide-and-Seek’) were on the tsarist secret police based on research in the newly opened Russian state archives. He began his academic career as a research fellow at Helsinki University in 1999, which thanks to Finnish Academy funding provided him with access to the former Communist Party and KGB archives in Moscow. This led to a British Academy Post-doctoral Fellowship at St Cross College, Oxford from 2001 to 2004 and after that a lectureship at Stirling University. He was appointed to his current post as Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Edinburgh in January 2010 and Senior Lecturer in 2016. He is currently completing a biography of the founder of the KGB, Felix Dzerzhinsky.

Between Diabolical Instigations and Criminal Combinations: Conspiracy Theories in Political Trials, 16th-19th century A public lecture with André Krischer (University of Münster) Abstract Conspiracy theories were not only a conspicuous element of public discourses in early modern England, spread by countless pamphlets and other sorts of printed media since the late 16th century. They also played a crucial role in political trials. As a result of the specific understanding of treason in common law as an ’imagination of the king’s death’, a traitor was always a conspirator, in league with the devil. This narrowing of conspiracy and treason was an important factor for the popular understanding of conspiracies as a deadly threat to state and society. In my lecture, I will show how conspiracy theories became an indispensable element of the legal language used in treason trials and how such trials served as propagators of conspiratorial narrations. I will also look at the discursive changes that took place during the period under investigation. When treason allegations became critical around 1800, political crimes were reinvented as ‘seditious conspiracies’, still bearing the notion of dangerous subversions and machinations. While my lecture is primarily concerned with England, I will give a comparative perspective on conspiracy theories in political trials in the Holy Roman Empire and show how the legal definitions were influenced by the English model. Biography André Krischer studied history, philosophy and English literature in Cologne and Bonn. He completed his D.Phil. in 2006 and Habilitation in 2015. He is currently a Lecturer in British history at the University of Münster, Germany, where he is also a Principal Investigator on the DFG-Collaborativ Research Centre ‘Cultures of Decision Making’ (SFB 1150) and on the Cluster of Excellence ‘Religion and Politics’ (EXC 212). He is interested in the cultural history of diplomacy and foreign relation in the early modern world, the visual history of religious violence, the history of bureaucratic and parliamentary procedures of decision making and the history of political crime. The history of conspiracies is a major focal point in his forthcoming book on the history of treason and treason trials in England from the 16th to the middle of the 19th century (which will be published with Aschendorff Books in 2017) and also of two volumes which he is editing. One is a cultural history of treason and treason discourses from the antiquity to the present (Verräter. Kulturgeschichte eines Deutungsmusters, Cologne (Böhlau) 2017), and the other is a collection of essays on assassinations and conspiracies as political crimes, ca. 1400-1900 (forthcoming with Constance University Press in 2017).

A public lecture by Professor Dr Michael Butter (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen) Abstract While conspiracy theories constituted legitimate knowledge in the United States in the past, they have lost this status in the present. Yet, they still possess commonsensical appeal. The continuing attraction of their stigmatized knowledge is nowhere more powerfully dramatized than in the novels of Dan Brown, which all evoke large-scale conspiracies that then turn out not to be true at all. At the same time, conspiracy theorizing might be changing its status again, as the successes of Donald Trump, who has embraced various conspiracy theories, during the Republican primaries suggest. Michael Butter is Professor of American Studies at the University of Tübingen. He is the author of Plots, Designs, and Schemes: American Conspiracy Theory from the Puritans to Present (2014) and has written various essays on different aspects of conspiracy theory. He also was the main proposer of the COST Action “Comparative Analysis of Conspiracy Theories” which brings together scholars from more than thirty countries and a dozen disciplines to explore European conspiracy theories for the next four years. This event is open to all and will be followed by a wine reception. This is part of a series of public talks from the Leverhulme-funded project Conspiracy and Democracy. More information at http://www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org/

A public lecture by Rob Brotherton (Barnard College, Columbia University) Abstract Why do people believe conspiracy theories? What’s the harm if they do? And just what is a conspiracy theory, anyway? Conspiracy theories captured the attention of philosophers and historians decades ago, but it is only within the last few years that psychologists have begun gathering data on these kinds of questions. In this talk, Rob Brotherton provides a psychological perspective on conspiracism, drawing on his own research as well as other insights explored in his new book Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories. In particular, research into cognitive biases and heuristics – quirks in the way our brains are wired – suggests that we’re all intuitive conspiracy theorists; some of us just hide it better than others. Rob Brotherton is an academic psychologist and science writer. He completed a PhD on the psychology of conspiracy theories with the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2013. Rob lectured at Goldsmiths for a year before moving to New York City, where he now teaches classes on conspiracy theories and science communication, as well as other aspects of psychology, at Barnard College, Columbia University. Rob's book on the psychology of conspiracy theories, Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories, was published by Bloomsbury in 2015. This event is open to all and will be followed by a wine reception. This is part of a series of public talks from the Leverhulme-funded project Conspiracy and Democracy. More information at http://www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org/

Conspiracy and Terror in the French Revolution - A public lecture by Marisa Linton (Kingston University) Abstract Conspiracies, both real and imagined, played a central role in the shifting dynamics of French revolutionary politics. This talk will look at how fear of conspiracy influenced decisions taken by revolutionary leaders during the most traumatic period of the Revolution - the Terror of the Year II (1793-94). Successive revolutionary factions were subject to a specific form of terror, the ‘politicians’ terror’, whereby they themselves were denounced as ‘the enemy within’ and put to death. This talk will examine the ideological, tactical and emotional factors that led some of the Revolution’s most prominent leaders, including Brissot, Danton, and Robespierre, to be condemned as secret conspirators against it. Biography Marisa Linton is currently Reader in History at Kingston University. She has written extensively on the political culture of the French Revolution and the French Enlightenment. She is the author of Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship and Authenticity in the French Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2013), a study of the political leaders of the French Revolution and the process whereby they came to ‘choose terror’. She is also the author of The Politics of Virtue in Enlightenment France (Palgrave, 2001), which examines how the Enlightenment concept of political virtue became an integral part of the language of revolutionary politics. She is the co-editor of Conspiracy in the French Revolution (Manchester University Press, 2007). Her other publications have addressed such subjects as: Robespierre’s political ideology; the concept of the political hero in French revolutionary politics; the intellectual origins of the French Revolution; and religious toleration in eighteenth-century France. She frequently writes for popular publications, such as History Today and BBC History, and has made several television and radio appearances. She is currently working on a further book for Oxford University Press, a study of four Jacobin leaders, Robespierre, Danton, Desmoulins and Saint-Just, to be entitled Saturn’s Children: Leaders of the French Revolution.

Enlightenment and Conspiracy - A Public lecture by Darrin McMahon (Dartmouth College, USA) In this talk McMahon will address the role of conspiracy and conspiratorial thinking in the intellectual culture of the long 18th century. Darrin M. McMahon is the Mary Brinsmead Wheelock professor at Dartmouth College, and formerly the Ben Weider Professor and Distinguished Research Professor at Florida State University. Born in Carmel, California, and educated at the University of California, Berkeley and Yale, where he received his PhD in 1998, McMahon is the author of Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2001) and Happiness: A History (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006), which has been translated into twelve languages, and was awarded Best Books of the Year honors for 2006 by the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Library Journal, and Slate Magazine. In 2013, McMahon completed a history of the idea of genius and the genius figure, Divine Fury: A History of Genius, published with Basic Books. He is also the editor, with Ryan Hanley, of The Enlightenment: Critical Concepts in Historical Studies, 5 vols. (Routledge, 2009); with Samuel Moyn, of Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History (Oxford University Press, 2014); and with Joyce Chaplin of Genealogies of Genius (Palgrave, 2015). McMahon has taught as a visiting scholar at Columbia University, New York University, Yale University, the University of Rouen, the École Normale Supérieur, École des Hautes Études, and the University of Potsdam. His writings have appeared frequently in such publications as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, New York Times Book Review, Slate, Washington Post, The New Republic, and the Literary Review.

The Real Ideology of Putin's Russia: how it's used in foreign policy and what to do about it Peter Pomerantsev Author of "Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia" - Shortlisted for the Guardian First Book award, Long listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize, Shortlisted for the Pushkin House Price and Gorden Burns Prizes). Open to all. No registration required. This event will be followed by a wine reception. This is part of a series of public talks from the Leverhulme-funded project Conspiracy and Democracy. More information at http://www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org

The assassination of Alvaro Obregón: jury trials and the problem of truth in post revolutionary Mexico A public lecture by Professor Pablo A. Piccato (Columbia University). Abstract When José de León Toral killed president elect Álvaro Obregón in July 1928, president Plutarco Elías Calles decided that the case would be tried in a penal court, to show the world the impartiality of the Mexican justice system. In the middle of a growing religious conflict, Calles wanted to avoid the demonstrations of Catholic popular support that followed the extrajudicial execution of other would-be assassins the year before. The jury trial against León Toral and his alleged accomplice, Concepción Acevedo, became an unprecedented media event, however, in which multiple conspiracy theories about the death of Obregón and the justice of tyrannicide were discussed in national radio broadcast, and fully transcribed in the newspapers. The case contributed to the elimination of jury trials in Mexico City and opened an era of popular skepticism toward the judicial system in general. Pablo Piccato, professor, specializes in Mexican history. He has worked on the political and cultural history of Mexico, and on the history of crime. He is currently working on an overview of crime in Mexico during the twentieth century. This event will be followed by a wine reception. This is part of a series of public talks from the Leverhulme-funded project Conspiracy and Democracy. More information at http://www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org.

Conspiracy and the beginning of the democratic state in Britain 1830 - 1860 A public lecture by Professor David Vincent (Emeritus Professor in History, Open University). Abstract: The lecture will examine the nature of conspiracy in the years immediately following the Great Reform Act of 1832, which laid the foundation for the development of a democratic state in Britain. Its broad question will be the extent to which the new polity was accompanied by a transformation in the way in which conspiracy was conceived and communicated. It will reassess the career of the diplomat and journalist David Urquhart, who accused successive politicians, particularly Lord Palmerston, of treasonable conduct in the 1830s and 1840s in the realm of international relations. And it will examine the postal espionage crisis of 1844 and the public controversy over surveillance and official secrecy. It will deploy a range of literary and visual evidence to consider issues including the function of mass communication in generating and facilitating conspiracy theories; the shift in focus from individuals to systems as the locus of conspiracy; the changing language of conspiracy and the decline of the caricature sensibility in the democratic discourse; the professionalisation of administration and the management of official information; the role of Jeremy Bentham, honorary godfather to Urquhart and theorist of the new democratic order.

Imitation Games: Conspiratorial Sciences and Intelligent Machines A public lecture by Professor Simon Schaffer (University of Cambridge) Please note the later start time of 5.30pm for this lecture. Abstract Influential public declarations about the normative system of the sciences produced in the mid-twentieth century by authorities such as J D Bernal ('The social function of science', 1939) and R K Merton ('Science and technology in a democratic order', 1942) urged the fundamental contrast between science and secrecy: what Merton significantly labeled 'communism' meant that scientists must and did publicise and share their work as widely as possible. A decade later, at a key conjuncture of the Cold War, inquiries in fields such as computation (Alan Turing 'Computing machinery and intelligence', 1950) and psychological politics (Edward Hunter, 'Brainwashing', 1950) described the opposite phenomenon: the importance of sequestered and secretive knowledge in scientific understanding and management of human intelligence. The relations between these normative systems and their role in public culture were important themes in the emergence of the imageries of science and secrecy in the mid-twentieth century. Professor Simon Schaffer is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, and has been a Fellow of Darwin College since 1985. Until recently he was editor of The British Journal for the History of Science. His research interests include the history of physical science and the social history of science. In July 2012 he was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy. Professor Schaffer was jointly awarded the Erasmus Prize in 2005 for the book Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life, which he co-authored with Steven Shapin. In 2004, he presented a series of documentaries for the BBC about light and the history of its study and knowledge.