I just learned that Thomas Milan Konda died on 29 January 2022 at the age of 74. (Here is his obituary.) Among other things, Professor Konda was the author of Conspiracies of Conspiracies: How Delusions Have Overrun America (University of Chicago Press, 2019), which surveys our obsession with conspiracy theories going back to the heady days of the French Revolution and a secret society known as the “Bavarian Illuminati”. As it happens, I had picked up a copy of Prof Konda’s book back in June of 2022 at my first meeting of the History of Economics Society (HES) but I did not get around to reading his scholarly work until now.

For my part, I once wrote about a little-known conspiracy theory (see here) that might have piqued Prof Konda’s deep and wide-ranging intellectual curiosity: a supposed centuries-old worldwide scheme to suppress the works of the great German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Although “the Leibniz conspiracy” is a relatively minor one in the scheme of things, it might nevertheless have grabbed Konda’s erudite attention (and that of his readers) because of the man who invented it, the legendary logician Kurt Gödel! Simply put, that one of the most logical and rigorous thinkers of all time could formulate such an elaborate and far-fetched conspiracy theory shows us why beliefs in conspiracies are so compelling, widespread, and unavoidable!