Winston Berg
2025-2026 Cohort
Winston is a political scientist and Lecturer on Social Studies at Harvard University. He studies how political communities form and defend beliefs under conditions of uncertainty—especially when traditional sources of epistemic authority, like experts, institutions, and consensus, lose their grip.
His first book project, The Infrastructure of Conspiracy Theories, addresses the growing concern that conspiracy theories signal the collapse of factual consensus in democratic life. The project begins with a puzzle that bridges political theory and empirical political science: why does such a breakdown feel so alarming when decades of public opinion research show that broad consensus over facts has rarely existed?
For Winston, the persistence of this anxiety points to a deeper condition. Conspiracy theories are troubling less because they reveal an irrational or misinformed public, and more because they exemplify what Stanley Cavell called the “threat of skepticism”—the ever-present possibility that others might withdraw recognition from our shared world. Such moments do not mark the loss of a secure agreement, but rather expose the fragility of the mutual attunement on which cooperation depends. Berg argues this fragility is not a problem to be solved but a permanent feature of political life.
Empirically, Winston examines movements that operate without epistemic consensus. One published study traces the genealogy of the “deep state” trope as an interpretive frame that enables differently motivated factions to stay in coalition by productively misreading one another, tacitly bracketing their deepest disagreements. Another project explores public debates within anti-vaccine mandate coalitions, where a front unified in its policy prescriptions ultimately fractures once epistemological differences become impossible to ignore. Across both contemporary and historical settings, such cases reveal that coalitions often endure not through shared facts, but through flexible interpretive frames capable of containing—and obscuring—deep divisions.
Normatively, Winston asks what democratic life might look like if skepticism is accepted as ineradicable, and enduring disagreement is treated as the ordinary condition in which politics has always taken place. What institutions and infrastructures can sustain cooperation without pretending to secure permanent consensus? And how can these arrangements resist domination without devolving into fragmented, exclusive and unaccountable private governance?
Before joining Harvard, Winston received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago, where he also taught in the Social Sciences Core sequence “Self, Culture and Society.” At Harvard, he teaches in the Social Studies sequence, and offers further original courses on political epistemology, social theory and democracy.
