Thread by @wydna00

The weakness of most conspiracy theory research is a consequence not of there being no actual object of inquiry, that is, no real “conspiracy” to uncover, but rather of that research’s insufficient grounding in sociological, psychological, historicist, or hermeneutical frameworks

Most researchers only adopt the most basic paradigm of “All the President’s Men” style journalistic exposé, but lack more advanced tools of critical textual hermeneutics, theories of ideology, and historicist conceptual genealogies to empower their work and direct them properly

Hermeneutics for example refers not to a vague philosophy of general meaning, but a technical body of interpretive principles and critical practices rooted in 17th century scholarship concerned with the scientific dating and authentication of Biblical texts and Papal documents

Often in reading testimonies or memoirs of CIA employees, organized crime figures, and other conspiracy theorists, its very easy for the conspiracy researcher to become beguiled as to how one account is to be properly evaluated relative to others. Hermeneutics addresses this

Likewise organizational sociology is necessary to decrypt the institutional logics which underpin the collective activity of intelligence agencies or corporations. And the critique of ideology allows one to understand the material function of worldviews apart from their content

Many researchers take the outward professions of the peculiar belief systems members of fringe groups and individuals hold at face value, rather than divorcing those professions from the actual social functions they execute. Needless to say the two levels are not interchangeable

In the course of his work, the researcher also inevitably amasses such a volume of information, that without a guiding theory of knowledge itself, the coherent synthesis and systemization of that information becomes impossible, which promotes an air of schizophrenic discontinuity

If you search in the CIA reading room you’ll find an enormous corpus of documents relating not to who killed JFK, but the technical design of the CIA card catalog and internal indexing and coding guidelines. These amount to a map of the CIA’s organizational “mind” so to speak.

But the specific study of these informational systems is a topic few researchers undertake themselves. Neither do they typically use existing studies on this topic to inform their work, of which they are several important ones. Understanding the internal logic though is crucial

I’d recommend these volumes to get into the philosophy, these specific Herder and Dilthey collections are the ones you want. The Herder volume here is more useful than the more common “Philosophical Writings” Cambridge edition edited by Michael Forster.

The Dilthey edition, volume IV, specifically contains the very important “Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutical System in Relation to Earlier Protestant Hermeneutics” and “The Eighteenth Century and the Historical World,” which are both essential. As well as some other good things.

But Volume V, Poetry and Experience, and Volume III, The Formation of the Historical World are the other editions in the series most useful here. Dilthey’s book Descriptive Psychology and Historical Understanding is another to seek out, available in this edition by Springer

Herder’s system or thought is built from a series of groundbreaking essays from the 1760s and 1770s. Critical Forests, Journal of my Voyage…, On the Origin of Language, Yet Another Philosophy pf History, On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul and several others

Because many of these pieces reflect on specific works and writers, ie Thomas Abbt, Ossian, or Shakespeare, conceptualizing the underlying system of thought is difficult, and the essays may at times seem insubstantial to a modern reader, but the fit together quite comprehensively

The best book on Herder in English is Robert Clark’s Herder: His Life and Thought, Berkeley University Press, 1955. It’s out of print and a used copy is priced at $800+, but it’s very detailed and reconstructs these desperate writings into a formal philosophy of anthropology

It’s worth going to the library to read if you’re interested in understanding this material, it’d be quite a thing if someone digitized it, just saying…

Otherwise AVOID the books Michael Forster has written on Herder. He’s the most prominent Herder scholar today but sucks

Otherwise these are some secondary treatments I’d recommend on Herder specifically

These four works all cover a lot of important ground. The Beiser of course is the best general history of historicism itself. The Betz is best study of Hamann who informs the development of many lines of thought here, and the Bowie takes Hamann as its starting point. basically

I would also say reading Rousseau’s discourses and Hume’s essays are important primary works as well. For Hume specifically, many of the economic essays and importantly On the Populousness of Ancient Nations as well

Here are some other general secondary sources to check out

But more generally I recommend reading these specifically on the the theory front