Yesterday, we turned to Franz L. Neumann’s influential 1957 essay on “Anxiety and Politics” to explore the inner logic of Kurt Gödel’s conspiracy theory, or what I like to call “The Leibniz Conspiracy”. In brief, according to Neumann (1957, p. 283), conspiracy theories have following three features in common: “intensification of anxiety through manipulation, identification, [and] false concreteness.” We already examined the “concreteness” of Gödel’s conspiracy theory in my previous post. Today, we will explore what Neumann refers to as “identification”.

First off, what does Neumann mean by identification? Simply put, he means that the alleged conspirators must belong to a specific and identifiable target or enemy group. For his part, Neumann identifies five such common targets or enemy groups in his classic 1957 essay: Jesuits, Freemasons, Communists, Capitalists, and Jews. But regardless of whether the conspirators are Jesuits or Jews, Communists or Capitalists, Freemasons or Illuminati, etc., etc. Neumann’s larger point is that the conspiracy in question must be orchestrated by members of an identifiable group.

In Gödel’s case, however, who were the members of the alleged conspiracy to suppress Leibniz’s works? Once again (see my previous post), Karl Menger provides a possible clue as to the identity of Gödel’s shadowy conspirators: the House of Hapsburg in Austria, which at one point was the most powerful dynasty in the world (see map pictured below). And this time, Menger’s report does not consist of second-hand hearsay; it is a first-hand account of a personal conversation he had with Gödel himself:

“Meanwhile, Gödel was more and more preoccupied with Leibniz. He was now completely convinced that important writings of this philosopher had not only failed to be published, but were destroyed in manuscript. Once I said to him teasingly, ‘You have a vicarious persecution complex on Leibniz’ behalf.’ Soon afterwards he said, ‘There is something I have wanted to ask you for quite a while. When was the Viennese (now Austrian) Academy of Sciences founded?’ I immediately suspected what Gödel was after. It is a historical fact that Leibniz negotiated for a time with the Emperor and his government about the founding of an Academy in Vienna, but that the negotiations came to nothing.”[1]

According to Menger’s account, Kurt Gödel believed as a matter of “historical fact” that Leibniz was negotiating directly with the House of Habsburg for the creation of a special academic institution to be located in the imperial city of Vienna, the implication being that Leibniz’s works would have been stored in this place. Apparently, however, Gödel had further reason to believe that these talks between Leibniz and the Habsburgs became acrimonious and that—when these contentious negotiations fell through—someone, perhaps acting under the direct orders of the Emperor of Austria-Hungary himself, must have acted in retaliation by destroying some of Leibniz’s writings.

Last of all, Neumann also refers to “anxiety” or to the psychological aspect of conspiracy theories. But is it helpful to think of conspiracy theories as a kind of mental disorder or mental ailment? After all, some conspiracies are real![2] Rest assured, I will consider this key question and conclude my survey of “The Leibniz Conspiracy” in my next post.

To be continued (footnote below the fold) …

[1] Karl Menger, “Memories of Kurt Gödel”, pp. 223-224, in Louise Golland, et al., editors, Reminiscences of the Vienna Circle and the Mathematical Colloquium, Springer Science (1994), pp. 200-236.

[2] For an in-depth example of a far-fetched but real conspiracy, see Ryan Holiday, Conspiracy: A True Story of Power, Sex, and a Billionaire’s Secret Plot to Destroy a Media Empire, Portfolio/Penguin (2018), describing an “unbelievable conspiracy” led by billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel against the popular Internet media outlet Gawker. See also Elizabeth Kolbert, What’s new about conspiracy theories?, The New Yorker (April 15, 2019), available at https://perma.cc/64PK-9EX2.