Overview
Andrew McKenzie-McHarg is a historian based at the University of Cambridge whose research interests extend from early modern forms of anti-Jesuit rhetoric to the emergence of the modern disciplines of social science in the twentieth century. He studied at the Free University of Berlin and at the University of Erfurt, where, in addition to writing his PhD, he developed an interest in currents of radical thought in late Enlightenment Germany. Since 2013 he has been a member of the Conspiracy and Democracy Project, a five-year project funded by the Leverhulme Trust and based at CRASSH (Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities) at the University of Cambridge. His major output from this project is the book The Hidden History of Conspiracy Theory, which examines the tensions that arise under the conditions of modern, democratically governed societies in which conspiracy theories have been delegitimized by modern social science yet encouraged by trends in democratic politics.
Research Focus
Invisible Authority: The Strange Career of the Unknown Superiors in Eighteenth-Century Europe
The eighteenth-century European enthusiasm for secret societies took an intriguing turn in the 1760s. In the German-speaking lands the identity of the authorities presiding over these associations was itself transformed into a secret. Rumours arose of “unknown superiors” (Unbekannte Obere). The speculation cast a spell on numerous Germans who immersed themselves in the shadowy politics and arcane knowledge of this twilight realm. Many now became convinced that the key to comprehending the nature and purpose of these societies lay in the question: who sits atop the hierarchy that constitutes their architecture?
An unknown superior as an authority figure seems an initially paradoxical and counterintuitive construct. It turned the standard logic on its head by experimenting with the use of what was not known about a “higher-up” as a means of inspiring trust and commanding respect. Admittedly this attempted fusion of authority and anonymity was highly contrived and inherently unstable. And yet the story of the unknown superiors threads its way through a succession of eighteenth-century secret societies. The reception of this notion extends to Paris where hidden intelligences supérieurs were invoked as sources of wisdom guiding the reconfiguration of society in the wake of the French Revolution. And last but not least, the unknown superiors entered the imagination of playwrights and authors who recognized the potential for narrative tension in their spectral and elusive presence.
The proposed project will culminate in the first book-length study of this cultural phenomenon. It will document the history of the unknown superiors as elements of the European imaginary as it stood on the cusp of modernity. It will also examine their empirical reality but, most importantly, it will use this admittedly eccentric case-study to explore more general sociological issues about the conditions under which authority is acknowledged or questioned.