How did it become possible to think of a racism without racists? This article tackles this question by looking at the contested interpretation of a racist incident in France. In 1969, Jewish shop owners in Orléans were baselessly accused of kidnapping women in fitting rooms and trafficking them into sexual slavery. This antisemitic agitation rapidly attracted the attention of local authorities, national media, and social scientists, led by sociologist Edgar Morin. Morin’s study made these events into a famous case-study in disinformation, the “rumor of Orléans.” But Morin was only one of several actors who attributed different causes to racism in Orléans. All of them agreed that racism was a serious problem, but they could not agree on its causes. Compared to other incidents at the time which grabbed media attention, the uncertainty of events in Orléans allowed people to debate this. Morin’s contribution was to turn to communications and social psychology to deploy the concept of “rumor.” He dissolved the problem of racism into a problem of communication. This suggests that in order to understand the emergence of “racism without racists,” we have to pay close attention to the context in which theories emerged to make it thinkable, and to the relationship between analyses of racism and communication.

Ideology shapes militant recruitment, organization, and conflict behavior. Existing research assumes doctrinal consistency, top-down socialization of adherents, and clear links between formal ideology and political action. But it has long been recognized that ideological commitments do not flow unaltered from overarching cleavages or elite narratives; they are uneven, contingent, fraught with tension, and often ambivalent. What work does ideology do in militant groups if it is not deeply studied, internalized, or sincerely believed? How can scholars explain collective commitment, affinity, and behavioral outcomes among militants who clearly associate themselves with a group, but who may not consistently (or ever) be true believers or committed ideologues? I argue that practical ideologies—sets of quotidian principles, ideas, and social heuristics that reflect relational worldviews rather than specific published political doctrines, positions, platforms, or plans—play a key role in militant socialization through everyday practices. Ethnographic evidence gained from fieldwork among Palestinians in Lebanon demonstrates how militants and affiliates render ideas about ideological closeness and distance accessible through emotional, intellectual, and moral appeals. This approach reaffirms the role of discourse and narrative in creating informal mechanisms of militant socialization without expressly invoking formal doctrine.

This article reexamines the parliamentary impeachment of the Duke of Buckingham, the royal favorite of King Charles I, by placing this event in the broader contexts of political culture and social change in early Stuart England. Buckingham's enemies based the impeachment on “common fame,” claiming that his faults were a matter of public knowledge. Charles, however, believed that the charges were based on seditious rumors. The impeachment undercut an important element of elite rhetoric that associated rumor with the rebellious multitude, revealing ideological divisions over the nature of grievances and the legitimacy of popular speech. The article contextualizes the impeachment within 1620s underground literature that purported to present the views of the common people, arguing that there was a wider tendency to ventriloquize public opinion. When Buckingham's allies produced their own tracts featuring the persona of the “honest ploughman,” appeals to the authority of public opinion were clearly gaining in strength. By explaining this development in political culture with reference to the growth of a more politically reliable “middling sort,” the article contributes to debates about the relationship between social change and political conflict in early Stuart England.