In this brilliant and provocative work, Daniel Pipes offers a fascinating analysis of conspiracy theories in the West and the terrible impact they have had. He shows how, beginning with the Crusades, Europe developed two strands of conspiracism. One took the form of secret societies from the Knights Templar through the Freemasons to the Council on Foreign Relations. A second insisted that "international Jewry" runs the world.

Pipes delineates the fear that one or the other of these agents engineered the French and Russian revolutions, two world wars, and all other key events of modern history. He shows the staggering consequences of conspiracy theories in the era when Hitler and Stalin reached power and then, in the aftermath of 1945, the migration of this way of thinking from the halls of power in the West to the political and geographic margins.

To anyone who has ever heard a friend or relative say, "Don't believe what you read in the papers," Conspiracy offers a spellbinding survey - and a wakeup call.