Plots have fed people's communal imaginary throughout the ages. We had nonetheless believed that this key which could explain the world’s complexity was over and done with, the residue of a past haunted by the irrational. In fact, our modern democracies are not protected from it. This engrained myth concerning an arrangement or understanding amongst people who have hatched ‘a concerted plan in secret against the life of person, or against somebody’s safety, or against an institution’, according to a definition found in Le Petit Robert dictionary. Few works up until the present have looked to analyse this phenomenon from the specific and unique perspective of conspiracy theory and the collective imaginary which encourages its use in political discourse and speeches. A relatively new field has thus opened up for Jérôme Jamin, a researcher at the ULg’s Centre for Ethic and Migration Studies (Cedem).

Populism and the far right are often considered, in the language of common currency and notably that of the media, to be very close to each other. Despite their differences – the first being opposed above all to elites and the second demonstrating the existence of a virulent nationalism fed by racism and anti-Semitism – a secret ingredient gives life to both and connects the two. This cement, a genuine unifying element, is constituted by the idea or the obsession of conspiracies. That is the hypothesis laid out by Jérôme Jamin and borne out by his work, thanks to a deep analysis of these two political expressions.

To demonstrate that it is indeed a unifying element he develops his thinking in three stages. At first, he builds up an ideal type model of the imaginary behind conspiracy theories, which leans on a considerable number of ideas, beliefs, symbols, values and images. It is equally based on a specific epistemology and on an ensemble of particular forms of reasoning used to explain politics and history. The imaginary conspiracy are also founded on certain generic contents: the conspiracy of the Bavarian Illuminati and/or that of freemasons, Jewish conspiracies – the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – and its variants (Judeo-masonic, Judeo-Bolshevik and American-Zionist, global conspiracies etc.). As for the ideal type model itself, it consists of an attempt to describe a phenomenon in a complete a way as possible, knowing full well that we will not find an example in the real world that corresponds totally to this description. Relationships or connections can be established in different fields – in the present case that of discourse – and the ideal type formulation.

JAMIN J., L’imaginaire du complot. Discours d’extrême droite en France et aux Etats-Unis, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2009 .