1. The making of a social scientific theory, which is grounded in dramatic political events, brings to the surface the question of its meaning, purpose, and historical role. Scientific theories, as well as common-sense insights that develop during wars, revolutions, or pandemics, tend to focus the human mind on fundamental problems of human existence, survival, and the extension of life.

When Serge Moscovici arrived in Paris in early 1948 as a political refugee, he did not know how to achieve his goal to become a ‘man of study’. His experience of the Second World War, of crimes against humans, and of problems of post-War Europe guided his thought towards questions such as what binds individuals and society together, and what separates them? These were political as well as intellectual and socio-cultural questions.

Moscovici’s generation of migrant social psychologists struggled with concrete questions of understanding political and cultural problems in their adopted countries, of the racism that the War inflicted with its full force, and of reconstructing the world that was left in ruins. Moscovici thought that social psychology could find solutions to these issues because it was a discipline in movement.

In recent historiography, the fear of a coordinated international conspiracy threatening the regimes established in the Vienna Settlement is depicted as a form of political paranoia, evoked to create an all-powerful police state. Instead, it is argued here that these fears were a rational response to an actual wave of revolutionary activity across Europe, but that there was widespread disagreement about the extent of international concertation of these various movements. In the attempts to corroborate suspicions of an international revolutionary conspiracy against the Restoration order, a variety of epistemic operations, practical routines and institutional forms of police cooperation were developed, which all contributed to the emergence of a European security culture. However, this culture was riddled with political tensions as a result of competing political interests in the fight against threats to the Restoration order.