The most controversial essays from the bestselling author once called the most dangerous man in America—collected for the first time. The nation’s most-cited legal scholar who for decades has been at the forefront of applied behavioral economics, and the bestselling author of Nudge and Simpler, Cass Sunstein is one of the world’s most innovative thinkers in the academy and the world of practical politics. In the years leading up to his confirmation as the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), Sunstein published hundreds of articles on everything from same-sex marriage to cost-benefit analysis. Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas is a collection of his most famous, insightful, relevant, and inflammatory pieces. Within these pages you will learn: • Why perfectly rational people sometimes believe crazy conspiracy theories • What wealthy countries should and should not do about climate change • Why governments should allow same-sex marriage, and what the “right to marry” is all about • Why animals have rights (and what that means) • Why we “misfear,” meaning get scared when we should be unconcerned and are unconcerned when we should get scared • What kinds of losses make us miserable, and what kinds of losses are absolutely fine • How to find the balance between religious freedom and gender equality • And much more... Cass Sunstein is a unique, controversial, and exciting voice in the political world. A man who cuts through the fog of left vs. right arguments and offers logical, evidence-based, and often surprising solutions to today’s most challenging questions.

Conspiracy theories are inevitable in complex human societies. And while they have always been with us, their ubiquity in our political discourse is nearly unprecedented. Their salience has increased for a variety of reasons including the increasing access to information among ordinary people, a pervasive sense of powerlessness among those same people, and a widespread distrust of elites. Working in combination, these factors and many other factors are now propelling conspiracy theories into our public sphere on a vast scale. In recent years, scholars have begun to study this genuinely important phenomenon in a concerted way. In Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them, Joseph E. Uscinski has gathered forty top researchers on the topic to provide both the foundational tools and the evidence to better understand conspiracy theories in the United States and around the world. Each chapter is informed by three core questions: Why do so many people believe in conspiracy theories? What are the effects of such theories when they take hold in the public? What can or should be done about the phenomenon? Combining systematic analysis and cutting-edge empirical research, this volume will help us better understand an extremely important, yet relatively neglected, phenomenon.

Drawing on psychology, political science, communication, and information sciences, this book explores the birth of conspiracy theories.

Taking a global and interdisciplinary approach, the Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories provides a comprehensive overview of conspiracy theories as an important social, cultural and political phenomenon in contemporary life. This handbook provides the most complete analysis of the phenomenon to date. It analyses conspiracy theories from a variety of perspectives, using both qualitative and quantitative methods. It maps out the key debates, and includes chapters on the historical origins of conspiracy theories, as well as their political significance in a broad range of countries and regions. Other chapters consider the psychology and the sociology of conspiracy beliefs, in addition to their changing cultural forms, functions and modes of transmission. This handbook examines where conspiracy theories come from, who believes in them and what their consequences are. This book presents an important resource for students and scholars from a range of disciplines interested in the societal and political impact of conspiracy theories, including Area Studies, Anthropology, History, Media and Cultural Studies, Political Science, Psychology and Sociology.

"This chapter addresses the complicated topic of conspiracy theories. This topic is complicated because a conspiracy theory is not prima facie wrong. Yet one of the hallmarks of false scientific beliefs is the claim by their adherents that they are the victims of profiteering, deceit, and cover-ups by conglomerates variously composed of large corporations, government regulatory agencies, the media, and professional medical societies. The trick is to figure out if the false ones can be readily separated from those in which there may be some truth. Only by carefully analyzing a number of such conspiracy theories and their adherents does it become possible to offer some guidelines as to which are most obviously incorrect. The chapter then studies the psychology of conspiracy theory adherence. It argues that belittling people who come to believe in false conspiracy theories as ignorant or mean-spirited is perhaps the surest route to reinforcing an anti-science position"--

This book focuses on the constant tension between democracy and conspiratorial behavior in the new global order. It addresses the prevalence of conspiracy theories in the phenomenon of Donald Trump and Trumpism, and the paranoid style of American politics that existed long before, first identified with Richard Hofstadter. Hellinger looks critically at both those who hold conspiracy theory beliefs and those who rush to dismiss them. Hellinger argues that we need to acknowledge that the exercise of power by elites is very often conspiratorial and invites both realistic and outlandish conspiracy theories. How we parse the realistic from the outlandish demands more attention than typically accorded in academia and journalism. Tensions between global hegemony and democratic legitimacy become visible in populist theories of conspiracy, both on the left and the right. He argues that we do not live in an age in which conspiracy theories are more profligate, but that we do live in an age in which they offer a more profound challenge to the constituted state than ever before.

The Routledge Handbook of Collective Responsibility comprehensively addresses questions about who is responsible and how blame or praise should be attributed when human agents act together. Such questions include: Do individuals share responsibility for the outcome or are individuals responsible only for their contribution to the act? Are individuals responsible for actions done by their group even when they don’t contribute to the outcome? Can a corporation or institution be held morally responsible apart from the responsibility of its members? The Handbook’s 35 chapters—all appearing here for the first time and written by an international team of experts—are organized into four parts: Part I: Foundations of Collective Responsibility Part II: Theoretical Issues in Collective Responsibility Part III: Domains of Collective Responsibility Part IV: Applied Issues in Collective Responsibility Each part begins with a short introduction that provides an overview of issues and debates within that area and a brief summary of its chapters. In addition, a comprehensive index allows readers to better navigate the entirety of the volume’s contents. The result is the first major work in the field that serves as an instructional aid for those in advanced undergraduate courses and graduate seminars, as well as a reference for scholars interested in learning more about collective responsibility.

"The author discusses how we should think about conspiracy theories, who believes them and why, which conspiracy theories are likely to be true or false and what criteria we can use to assess them, and what we should do to combat dangerous conspiracism and reestablish trust in our democratic institutions, in the media, and in one another"--

"Alan Levine provides a chronological road map to our disharmonious present moment while also complicating our understanding of "the politics of truth." His essay traces major conceptions of truth in Western philosophy from Socratic skepticism and medieval faith to enlightenment optimism and postmodern rejection, arguing that aspects of all these belief traditions are alive and kicking, forming in our polity a kind of "metaphysical pluralism." To navigate our current pluralist or fractured conceptions of truth, Levine argues that we should strive to avoid both excessive dogmatism and relativism"--

This volume considers forms of information manipulation and restriction in contemporary society. It explores whether and when manipulation of the conditions of inquiry without the consent of those manipulated is morally or epistemically justified. The contributors provide a wealth of examples of manipulation, and debate whether epistemic paternalism is distinct from other forms of paternalism debated in political theory. Special attention is given to medical practice, for science communication, and for research in science, technology, and society. Some of the contributors argue that unconsenting interference with people’s ability of inquire is consistent with, and others that it is inconsistent with, efforts to democratize knowledge and decision-making. These differences invite theoretical reflection regarding which goods are fundamental, whether there is a clear or only a moving boundary between informing and instructing, and whether manipulation of people’s epistemic conditions amounts to a type of intellectual injustice. The collection pays special attention to contemporary paternalistic practices in big data and scientific research, as the way in which the flow of information or knowledge might be curtailed by the manipulations of a small body of experts or algorithms.