POWER, POLITICS,
IMAGINATION

My scholarship straddles twentieth-century political thought and contemporary political theory, examining our recent past to better understand our present and possible futures.

Much of my research concerns the role of the imagination in politics, though I also do work in environmental politics, democratic theory, literature, and intellectual history.

In addition to my forthcoming book, I’ve published in venues such as Contemporary Political Theory, Environmental Politics, Political Research Quarterly, and The Review of Politics, and also contributed public writing to Boston Review and the Orwell Foundation.

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I’m currently pursuing four related lines of scholarly inquiry. The first revolves around my book project and concerns the role of dystopian imaginaries in politics. The second extends a historical inquiry from the book to engage Orwell as a political and psychological analyst of power. The third retrieves a counter-history of environmental politics by emphasizing linkages with decolonization and demilitarization from the 1970s to today. The fourth explores democratic alternatives to technocratic domination. You can learn more about my work in each area below.

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  1. Dystopia and the Politics of Imagination

Monograph: Fear the Future: Dystopia and Political Imagination in the Twentieth Century (University of Michigan Press)

Are we living in dystopian times? Dark visions of the future are ubiquitous in political commentary and popular culture, but political theorists have yet to ask how we got here or what it means for our political prospects. Fear the Future tells a story in which dystopia is not just a genre of literature or a form of social criticism, but a political imaginary that has influenced a century of thinking about power, freedom, and responsibility. It’s an adventure of political ideas spanning from the Enlightenment to the 2016 Election, encompassing the rise and fall of modern utopianism, the long shadow of totalitarianism, and the nightmares of authoritarian rule, technological manipulation, and ecological collapse that haunt the political imagination today.

Book cover titled "Fear the Future: Dystopia and Political Imagination in the Twentieth Century" by Matthew Benjamin Cole, featuring an illustration of a human face with a cityscape and laboratory equipment emerging from its head.
“... [A] significant contribution to twentieth-century Euro-American political thought... the book combines—in an unusual, insightful, and creative manner—scholarship from political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies. The result is a compelling work of scholarship.”
— Duncan Bell, University of Cambridge
“... [T]imely and imaginative... Cole deftly unpacks Ballardian, Huxleyan, Orwellian and other visions of dictatorship... The growing convergence of so many of these nightmares of future and not-so-distant evils and the constant vying of the imaginary with the real for terroristic primacy makes for grim and compelling reading. ”
— Gregory Claeys, University of London

Related Publications

2. ORWELL: THE IMAGINATION OF POWER
AND THE POWER OF THE IMAGINATION

This project develops my work on George Orwell into a trilogy of articles - and eventually a second book - examining Orwell’s place in the history of political thought and his importance for political theory in our age of authoritarian resurgence. I read Orwell as an analyst of the political mind, offering a distinct and timely psychopolitical account of power which helps us to understand how domination becomes desirable, how cruelty becomes affectively sustainable, and what psychic resources we have left to resist. But I also take Orwell’s commitment to democratic socialism seriously, highlighting his underappreciated stewardship of the utopian imagination and his emotive rendering of human brotherhood as the central socialist ideal.

A black and white photo of a man sitting at a desk with a BBC microphone in front of him. The man has dark, slightly messy hair, is biting his lower lip, and is wearing a suit jacket, shirt, and tie.

Related Publications

Works in Progress

  • “’A Peace that is No Peace’: Orwell’s Anti-Militarism and the Age of Endless War”

  • “Fascism and the Riddle of Cruelty: The Orwellian Psychopolitics of the Far Right”

3. ECOLOGICAL CRISIS AND POLITICAL WORLDMAKING

The climate crisis is just the most recent instance of the political imagination confronting the prospect of ecological collapse. My research asks how ecological crises generate new modes of political thought and action. My published work engages contemporary works of environmental literature and political theory, while my most recent work - and planned third book project - develops a historical narrative, retrieving a global archive of radical ecopolitical projects - in India, Kenya, Germany, and the United States -  which sought to defend the shared earth from the ravages of war and empire.

Related Publications

  • “‘At the Heart of Human Politics’: Agency and Responsibility in the Contemporary Climate Novel,” Environmental Politics 3, no.1 (2022): 132 – 151. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2021.1902699.

  • “Return to Ecotopia?”, Contemporary Political Theory 23, 660 – 665 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-023-00661-1.

  • “On the Vitalist Politics of Amitav Ghosh,” Contemporary Critical Studies - Special Issue: Literature and the Political Imagination (forthcoming, 2026)

Works in Progress

  • “Another World Was Possible: Ecological Crisis and Planetary Politics in the Long 1970s”

4. TECHNOPOLITICS AND DEMOCRATIC FUTURITY

My most recent work takes aim at the technological dystopias of the information age, contributing to debates in contemporary democratic and critical theory. It critiques emergent forms of technocratic domination and articulates democratic alternatives, posing the central question: will the future be determined by us or for us?

Related Publications

Works in Progress

  • “Not-So-Fast-Forward? Doomers, Decelerationists, and Democratic Future-Making”