Matthew Benjamin Cole mbenjamincole@fas.harvard.

edu
Preceptor of Expository Writing 919-485-9778
Harvard College Writing Program

Proposed Title:
Dystopia and Political Imagination in the Twentieth Century

Rationale and Scope:

We frequently hear the complaint that political thinking in our time suffers from a lack of
imagination. But when it comes to producing images of the future with which to frighten and
torment ourselves, who could accuse the twenty-first century of lacking ingenuity? Aside from
apocalypses of the nuclear and ecological varieties, pressing enough to say the least, we also
confront futures in which the species Homo sapiens survives but forfeits its humanity in the
bargain. Designer children and eugenic caste systems, technologies of surveillance and
manipulation, a global resurgence of “neo-” feudalisms and despotisms dedicated to the
wholesale exploitation of dwindling natural and human resources: these and still darker
possibilities now pervade the collective imagination. From social criticism and literary fiction to
young adult novels and their inevitable cinematic adaptations, it seems that every future fit to
depict now has a hint of Brave New World or 1984 about it. And these are the ones where don’t
all burn, or freeze, or get wiped out when the AI get frustrated with the limits of our DNA-based
hardware.
Dystopia is the twentieth century’s most distinctive and unsettling contribution to the political
imagination, an innovation born of crisis and faltering hope. Its ancient ancestor, the utopia, had
thrived in the philosophy, literature, and even the real social life of the preceding century. But in
the wake of the First World War, and with the emergence of the first totalitarian regimes,
European writers were inclined to adopt a bleaker view of the human prospect. They began to
imagine future societies of an altogether different sort: “negative utopias,” ingenious cages for
the human spirit. This tendency finds paradigmatic expression in Zamyatin's We, and with
Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984, it yields two of the century's most influential
novels. However, the dystopian impulse is by no means confined to the field of speculative
fiction. Particularly in the post-war era, dire predictions about the likely course of social
evolution can be found in the works of philosophers, sociologists, economists, and theologians.
Like the novels which are more familiarly described as dystopian, these works depict future
societies in which freedom has been eliminated and warn that the makings of such a world are
already underway.
My book manuscript, provisionally titled Dystopia and Political Imagination in the Twentieth
Century, advances a distinctive interpretation of twentieth century political thought, one which
emphasizes the pervasiveness of dystopian images, themes, and anxieties. It explains why, after
centuries of utopian speculation, late nineteenth and early twentieth century writers felt
compelled to warn of dystopian futures, and it assesses the role of dystopian thinking in
twentieth century political thought.1 Though it does not provide a comprehensive account of
1
Whereas I use the term “dystopian thinking” to refer to specific dystopian thought experiments and the critical
perspectives which they advance, the broader “dystopian imagination” refers to a more diffuse but for that reason
more encompassing ensemble of anxieties and the concepts, images, and narratives which have been used to convey
them.
dystopia, each chapter seeks to distill a key moment in the development of dystopian thought. As
will be explicated below, the chapters alternate between wide-ranging surveys of intellectual
history and focused analyses of key intellectual figures in order to provide both breadth and
depth in the reconstruction. As such, the work combines contextual reading with close analysis
of key works. In addition to its primary goal of reconstruction and retrieval, the book makes a
cumulative argument for the value of dystopia in orienting political thought toward the future, in
contrast to interpretations which associate dystopia with a politics of pessimism and despair. 2
The primary goal of the study is to relate a pivotal sequence in the history of political ideas
that has yet to receive the scholarly attention it deserves. Though the “death,” “decline,” “end,”
or “exhaustion” of utopia was a major theme of twentieth century political thought, 3 political
theorists have had little to say about the dystopian outlook which rose to prominence in the same
period – or about the role of dystopias in the political imagination today. There have been
numerous illuminating studies of dystopian literature,4 as well as a small number of intellectual
histories that speak to the genealogies of utopian, anti-utopian, and dystopian writing in broader
terms.5 But the story of dystopia as a chapter in the history of political ideas has not yet been
told, nor has dystopian thinking been given its due as a mode of political theorizing. Whereas
scholarship on utopian thought and politics has approached utopian literature as a single facet of
the broader enterprise of utopian “social dreaming,”6 the social nightmares that left such a vivid
impression on the modern political consciousness have been comparatively neglected. And this
goes to the heart of what makes dystopia a compelling and disconcerting phenomenon. We might
begin by noting that the most influential dystopias – Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s
1984 – were written as extensions of serious social and political arguments raised by their
authors in contemporaneous essays, and they significantly influenced the intellectual discourse
on their respective themes from then on. As such, they deserve a place in the history of political
ideas as well as in literature.
Once we accept the idea that dystopias are hypotheses about the future which can be found
outside the fiction section, we will quickly see how thoroughly the terrain of modern political
thought is saturated by dystopian anxieties. Twentieth century political thought in particular has

2
Such as Frederic Jameson Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions
(London: Verso, 2005) and Jill Lepore, “A Golden Age for Dystopian Fiction,” The New Yorker, May 29, 2017.
3
Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), Judith
Shklar, After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), Daniel Bell. The
End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1960), Lezek
Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
4
Such as Rafaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, eds. Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination
(London: Routledge, 2003), Erika Gottlieb, Dystopian Fiction West and East: Universe of Terror and Trial
(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction,
Utopia, Dystopia (London: Routledge, 2000), Mark Hillegas, The Future as Nightmare: H.G. Wells and the Anti-
Utopians (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), Chad Walsh, From Utopia to Nightmare (New York: Harper
and Row, 1962). There are of course many other books and book chapters discussing individual works or writers
that fall within the dystopian category, but here I am concerned with those engage dystopia conceptually.
5
Most recent and important among them is Gregory Claeys, Dystopia: A Natural History (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2017), which I will discuss further in the “other publications” section. Other important works are
George Kateb’s Utopia and its Enemies (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1963), Krishan Kumar’s Utopia and Anti-Utopia
in Modern Times (London: Blackwell, 1987), and Russell Jacoby’s Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-
Utopian Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
6
According to Lymann Towers Sargent, the “three faces” of utopianism are literature, social thought, and the
construction of intentional communities. See Lymann Towers Sargent, “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited,”
Utopian Studies, 5:1 (1994), 1-37. See also Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Oxford: Peter Lang, 1990).
been overwhelmingly and obsessively, a dystopian enterprise, anxious and critical, preoccupied
with domination and dehumanization – an overgrowth of fear and negativity in a tradition whose
classical themes were justice and the good. Among major twentieth century thinkers we find a
nightmarish panorama: Weber's “iron cage” of bureaucracy, Adorno's “administered world,” and
Marcuse's “one-dimensional” society; Habermas speaks of a “negative utopia of technical
control” and Arendt of a “society of laboring animals”; Foucault describes a swarming of
disciplinary institutions and an encroaching biopolitical regime. But this is just the tip of the
iceberg. During the 1940s and 1950s, the dominant interpretation of totalitarianism among
humanistic intellectuals is a dystopia of “total control.” In the second half of the century,
characteristics of that dystopia are transferred to new specters: the mass society, the consumer
society, the technological society or technocracy. Today, we fear dystopias of total surveillance,
of class stratification entrenched by technology, of racial and ethnic nationalism, corporate
oligarchy, and ecological collapse – though it remains to be seen what, if anything, the canon of
political thought can contribute to our confrontation with these prospects. My study is motivated
by the conviction that we will better grasp the stakes of our own times, fraught with anxiety as
they undoubtedly are, if we understand how the dystopian outlook has evolved to become one of
the predominant fixtures of our horizon of expectations.
This study also contributes to a broader discourse within political theory that highlights the
role of the imagination in politics – such as symbols, images, myths, and narratives – both as a
constitutive “background” condition and as a resource which is mobilized explicitly in certain
forms of political argumentation and appeal. The theoretical basis for this discourse derives
largely from works by Cornelius Castoriadis and Paul Ricoeur,7 though it is in the last two
decades that the political imagination or imaginary has become a salient theme in political
theory, thanks to important contributions from Ciara Bottici and Benoit Challand, Susan Buck-
Morss, Mihaela Czobor-Lupp, Jason Frank, Raymond Guess, George Kateb, Keally McBride,
Alison McQueen, Charles Taylor, and Sheldon Wolin. 8 Many of these works have also attended
to the politics of imagination, establishing a line of inquiry concerned with normative questions
about the role of imagination in political life. Does an excess of imagination lead, as anti-
utopians often fear, to totalitarian hubris? Or does the renunciation of political imagination in the
name of realism lead, in its own way, to hopelessness or disorientation?
Of particular concern in this study is the way that the political imagination fills out a space of
possibilities, that is, a set of both conscious and unconscious judgments about what is likely,
7
See Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1987) and Paul Ricouer, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). See also
their essays in Gillian Robinson and John Rundell, eds., Rethinking Imagination (London: Routledge, 1994).
8
See Chiara Bottici, Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and the Imaginary (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2014); Chiara Bottici and Benoit Challand, eds., The Politics of Imagination (New York: Birbeck
Law Press, 2011); Bottici and Challand, Imagining Europe: Myth, Memory and Identity (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2013); Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East
and West (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002); Mihaela Czobor-Lupp, Imagination in Politics: Freedom or Domination?
(London: Lexington Books, 2014); Jason Frank, Publius and Political Imagination (Lanham: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2014); Raymond Guess, Politics and the Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010);
George Kateb, "The Adequacy of the Canon," Political Theory, 30 (4): 2002, 482-505; Keally McBride, Collective
Dreams: Political Imagination and Community (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005);
Alison McQueen, Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Charles
Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Sheldon Wolin, Democracy
Incorporated : Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2008).
probable, or possible.9 If we are to understand the history of our political ideas, we must attend to
the way that this space of possibilities has conditioned political thinking, as well as the way that
political thinkers have in turn narrowed or expanded the space of possibilities. Even possibilities
which are remote – perhaps even those which are not, strictly speaking, possibilities at all – may
have profound effects insofar as they enter into the thought and judgment of an era. For example,
the prospect of global nuclear war which hung so vividly over the second half of the twentieth
century (and which, sadly enough, we would still relegate prematurely to history) was never
made good on, and as that specter grows more remote, some will no doubt want to argue that the
cataclysmic possibilities of “mutually assured destruction” were overstated. And yet it is
inarguably the case that this threat structured the political existence of billions for the better part
of a century and continues to do so today. A possibility, even a distant one, can be a powerful
thing. It is an objective of my study to show that the entry of dystopian scenarios into the space
of possibilities constitutes a significant event in the history of political ideas.
In principal, dystopian thinking can be applied to any ideological or normative end, and the
range of dystopian thought experiments has included visions motivated by both far-right and far-
left critiques of society, as well as many kinds of humanistic social criticism. Nonetheless, the
twentieth century dystopias examined in this study all raise concerns regarding the future of
human freedom. Further, all of the dystopias discussed in the study are societies in which
domination is deeply and permanently entrenched through modern techniques of organization
and control. The later chapters of the book grapple with the variations on this image found in
twentieth century political thought, noting the structural continuity between dystopian criticisms
of totalitarianism, mass society, and technocracy, and their significance for contemporary
thinking about freedom and domination as exemplified in works by Arendt, Habermas, Foucault,
and their many followers in contemporary political theory.
What is most significant about political thinking at this juncture is how it contrasts with the
surfeit of utopian thought which initially emerged out of the Enlightenment. By the middle of the
twentieth century, utopian prospects had been defeated or discredited, such that they can no
longer orient politics toward the future. This is not to say they lost all value as written forms of
social criticism or philosophical speculation, but simply that in the aftermath of totalitarianism
and total war they lost their ability to illuminate the future, and with it, the political and ethical
choices facing the modern world. The re-orientation of political thought around a summum
malum, one which responds to the needs of an intellectual and political culture which is, if not
thoroughly anti-utopian, then at the very least post-utopian, is one of the major tendencies of
political thought in the twentieth century. The characteristics of this summum malum are also
unique in the history of political ideas. Whereas classical thinkers like Plato and Aristotle
dwelled on the degeneration of regimes into anarchy, and Hobbes feared the collapse of the
9
Though I have deployed it with a different explanatory purpose in mind, the concept of a “space of possibilities”
most nearly resembles Reinhardt Koselleck’s notion of a “horizon of expectations,” which I invoke here and
particularly in my discussion of futurity. In Reinhardt Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time,
trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). But whereas Koselleck describes the horizon of
expectations as a “metahistorical category,” my inquiry concerns the specific ways in which this horizon is
imaginatively filled out with more or less concrete descriptions of the future. In this respect, my inquiry resembles
Fred Polak’s massive, sweeping examination of the interplay between our visions of the future and our ethical
commitments in the present, as well as Robert Heilbroner’s concise, but also sweeping, investigation of the same
subject. See Fred Polak, The Image of the Future, trans. Elise Boulding (Amsterdam: Elsevier Scientific Publishing,
1973) and Robert Heilbroner, Visions of the Future: The Distant Past, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996).
commonwealth into civil war, the specter which haunts the twentieth century is not disorder but
what Eyal Chowers has referred to as “hyper-order.”10 It is the danger of a social order that
ossifies into an unchangeable and unbreakable shell, its patterns of domination so deeply
entrenched at the psychological, institutional, and cultural levels that it gradually becomes
impossible to resist – not only in action, but, at the furthest extreme, even in thought.
For the intellectuals who confronted this danger, dystopian thinking underscored the necessity
of finding new bases for freedom in social and political life. Though the critiques of
totalitarianism, mass society, and technocracy focus on their own distinctive arrays of
domination, each underscores a vulnerability in the human species which is brought to light by
the understanding of human freedom as a contingent and revocable social condition rather than a
guarantee underwritten by human nature. For the various thinkers and writers who
conceptualized dehumanization as a loss or acquittal of human freedom, there was now an urgent
need to discover and to preserve the social conditions which would sustain freedom. This
includes the formal political institutions which enshrine individual liberty and democratic self-
rule, as well as the cultural and psychological conditions which make individual and collective
autonomy a practical possibility. Where the latter withers, the former becomes a hollow shell, or
worse, an illusion fostering complacency.
Dystopia and Political Imagination in the Twentieth Century illustrates the interplay between
the imagination of freedom and of domination by following the dystopian thread through the
works of arguably the three most influential political theorists of the last century: Hannah
Arendt, Jurgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault. As with the other dystopian theorists of
totalitarianism, mass society, and technocracy, each of these thinkers reflects on
characteristically modern forms of domination. Their works converge in depicting a society in
which freedom is imperiled by impersonal forces arising out of those domains of technology,
industry, and social organization where rationality and progress are taken to be most advanced,
including the relentlessness of cyclical production and consumption, the pervasiveness of state
and corporate power, the domination of the public sphere by commercial media, the anonymous
rule of bureaucrats and experts, and the pressure to conform which is imposed by disciplinary
institutions even as it arises endogenously from the tendencies of mass society.
The book contributes to the study of these thinkers by offering new context for and analysis
of the negative poles of their work, illustrating how distinctive visions of domination have in turn
structured their vital contributions to political thought. Serious consideration of dystopian futures
led Arendt, Habermas, and Foucault to articulate ideas of freedom which would be adequate to
the unique perils of the modern world. While it would be an overstatement to say that any of
them present convincing alternatives, utopian or otherwise, they do facilitate reflection on the
political and ethical work from which such alternatives may be advanced. Each theorist draws
our attention to a distinctive ensemble of political and ethical practices which enable,
respectively, forms of collective and individual autonomy. These practices must be safeguarded
against the encroachment of processes and institutions which subordinate autonomy to hierarchy,
normalization, and manipulation of various kinds. For Arendt, this principally means the
preservation of a public sphere in which speech and action can provide meaningful opportunities
for under-determined activity, and along with it, opportunities for citizens to encounter one
another in their uniqueness. It is her conviction that we can only exercise our characteristically
human capacity to reach out into the new under such circumstances. In Habermas’ thought,
freedom is first and foremost the capacity for autonomy that inheres in a social world governed
10
Eyal Chowers, The Modern Self in the Labyrinth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).
by free and open communication. The dangers to this kind of autonomy, which is at once moral
and political, are manifold: from the instrumentalizing procedures embodied by the market and
the administrative state to the encroachment of technical rationality into the very fabric of
socialization and interaction. And in Foucault’s wide-ranging oeuvre, we see how the modern
subject may yet find opportunities for self-creation and self-mastery even as he or she is
constituted, in a great many respects, by the manifold techniques of disciplinary society and its
pressures toward normalization. For Foucault, what is at stake in such projects is not the retrieval
of an antecedently true or authentic self, let alone of human nature, but instead the continual and
critical re-invention of the self, and the emancipation of new possibilities for the future.
In order for freedom to exist, individuals must be able to develop into unique personalities
rather than being treated as interchangeable members of a species, social groups must be able to
exercise shared power over economic and political institutions rather than being subordinated to
their impersonal forces, and the future must be seen as an open horizon in which new
possibilities are not foreclosed by an unchanging present. Dystopian thought makes us aware of
all of this by describing in detail how each of these conditions could be altered. In doing so it
underscores the importance of developing new practices of ethical reflection and political action
which can provide the basis for individual and collective self-determination. But the dystopian
thinker always underscores the possibility that these practices will be lost absent an active
commitment to their preservation.
From the overwhelming negativity of a century which frequently contemplated the extremes
of domination emerges an altogether positive conception of human freedom. As an observation
on the history of political thought, this underscores Bernard Yack’s claim that we may well
overrate the importance of utopian ideals in structuring our normative thinking, both historically
and practically speaking.11 Negativity, by contrast, turns out to be an underrated resource for
normative thought. Stuart Hampshire remarks, in a similar vein, that while liberal theory tends to
“think of great public evils as a falling away from the pursuit of justice or of the good … it is
equally possible to interpret, and to understand, the things we consider good as being the
prevention of great evils.”12 By exploring the great evils to which modern societies are liable,
dystopian thinking brings texture and tension to our thinking about such values as freedom,
equality, and dignity that ideal theorizations alone cannot. My interpretation of twentieth century
political thought therefore emphasizes the generative role of dystopian images, providing a clue
as to how we may grapple with our own uncertain future in the absence of a utopian horizon.

Readership:
Dystopia and Political Imagination is intended for a scholarly audience, specifically for scholars
and graduate students working in the fields of political theory, intellectual history, literature, and
utopian studies. However, the interdisciplinary nature of the study as well as the current interest
in dystopias should give the book a broader-than-usual audience for a scholarly manuscript.
Individual chapters of the book could be assigned in survey courses on modern political thought,
contemporary political theory, and politics and literature, as well as in theme courses related to
the more specific content of the book, ie., utopias and dystopias, critical social theory, and
11
See the introduction to Bernard Yack, Longing for Total Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1986). There, he argues that an important lineage of modern social philosophy, going back to Rousseau and Schiller,
has been principally motivated by fears of dehumanization in general and the loss of human freedom in particular –
rather than any particular image of the good society or the good life.
12
Innocence and Experience, Harvard University Press (67)
imagination in politics, or in courses on focal figures from the book.

Chapters:
The introduction, “Dystopia and Political Imagination,” discusses the salience of dystopia in
the twenty-first century political imagination, drawing examples from discussions of
authoritarianism, surveillance, “post-truth” media, and other dystopian concerns. This ongoing
resurgence of dystopia provides a hook into the book’s historical argument. This chapter also
contextualizes dystopia in relation to the history of political thought and debate over the
character of “modernity,” and introduces the concept of the political imagination which will
recur throughout the study.

Chapter 1, “The Modern Space of Possibilities,” explains how dystopian anxieties found a
foothold in the modern political imagination over the course of the nineteenth century. Following
a survey of modern utopian thought and its discontents, I consider key examples of early
dystopian speculation in both fiction and non-fiction, arguing that the dystopian imagination is
best understood as an expression of uncertainty about the future of humanity. This is the widest-
ranging survey chapter in the book, and it discusses thinkers such as Bacon, Marx, Tocqueville,
Dostoevsky, Wells, and Nietzsche before moving into an in-depth analysis of Weber and
Zamyatin. It contains the following sub-sections:
 Futurity, Mastery, and Modern Utopianism
 The Future of Humanity as a Problem in Modern Thought
 Rational Society in the Dystopian Imagination: Weber and Zamyatin
o Bureaucratic Society and the Dissolution of the Self: Weber’s “Iron Cage”
o The Mathematically Perfect Life of the One State: Zamyatin’s We
 Conclusion

Chapter 2, “Utopia and its Negative,” examines the relationship between utopian and dystopian
thinking. The chapter contrasts the anti-utopian outlook of many post-war liberals, such as Berlin
and Talmon, which linked utopianism to totalitarianism, with the outlook of dystopian writers
like Huxley and Orwell, whose works have frequently been subsumed to the anti-utopian side. I
aim to show that their dystopian visions were meant to underscore the need for a utopian
alternative, and that, contra the anti-utopians, they feared the closure of the political imagination
more than its excesses. It contains the following sub-sections:
 The Case Against Utopia
 The Negative Utopianism of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley
o The Welfare Tyranny of Utopia: Huxley’s Brave New World
o A Vision of the Totalitarian Future: Orwell’s 1984
 Conclusion

Chapter 3, “Paradigms of Dystopian Thinking,” considers the post-war debates around

totalitarianism, mass society, and technocracy. By considering a wide range of intellectuals who
contributed to one or more of these discourses, I aim to show how attempts to theorize modern
society on these terms went beyond the descriptive or predictive in order to develop an
imaginative critique of modern tendencies toward domination and dehumanization. Exemplary
figures in this chapter include Arendt, Fromm, Riesman, Ortega y Gasset, Mills, Ellul, Mumford,
and Marcuse. It contains the following sub-sections:
 In Leviathan’s Belly: The Trauma of the Total State
 Fear of the Masses: Autonomy in the Era of Crowds
 The Mechanized Mind: Technocracy and Technological Society
 Conclusion

Chapter 4, “Theorizing Freedom and Domination,” reflects on the continued relevance of

dystopian thinking to contemporary political theory. In particular, it considers the dystopian
moments in the works of Hannah Arendt, Jurgen Habermas, and Michael Foucault, as well as in
the work of contemporary thinkers inspired by their approaches to social and political theory.
The chapter shows how each of these writers enlists and transforms the concepts of
totalitarianism, mass society, and technocracy as a way of characterizing the negative potential
of modernity, and, further, how each articulates a distinctive conception of freedom in response.
It contains the following sub-sections:
 The Abyss of the Possible: Arendt and the Republicanism of Fear
 Antimonies of a Rational Society: Habermas Between Utopia and Dystopia
 The Circuitry of Power and Domination: Foucault and the Technologies of the Self
 Conclusion

The conclusion of the book distills three key themes from the study. Drawing on the material
discussed in the preceding chapters, it indicates that dystopian thinking sheds light on the role of
the imagination in politics, on the political concepts of freedom and domination, and on the
ethical concept of the human. Dystopian thinking endures because it meets a need for orientation
toward the future which modern utopianism was once able to provide. Rather than rejecting or
endorsing utopianism, I emphasize the unique critical and imaginative capacities of dystopian
thinking. As evidence of the force of the dystopian appeal to the future, I discuss the dystopia
revival that has occurred since Trump’s inauguration in early 2017 and its political stakes.

Length:
The complete manuscript will total about 60,000-70,000 words. It does currently not contain any
illustrations, charts, or other visual components. Drafts of chapters 1-3 are available as samples.

Comparison:
The only existing intellectual history of dystopia is Gregory Claeys Dystopia: A Natural History
(Oxford, 2017). Both of our books approach dystopia as a concept with broad intellectual,
cultural, and political influence that extends beyond the study of dystopian fiction, though my
work has a more significant focus on the political dimensions of dystopia. Even so, the books
differ significantly in their interpretation of dystopia. First, Claey’s substantive definition of
dystopia is narrower: he defines a dystopia as a society based on fear or “diminished sociability”
as opposed to the “enhanced sociability” of a utopia. But, as even Claeys acknowledges, this
definition is problematic for “soft” dystopias in the vein of Brave New World where sociality is
enhanced to the point where individuality is destroyed. As noted above, I think the substance of
dystopia, at least for the twentieth century, is better understood in terms of its threat to human
freedom.
However, this distinction is ultimately less significant than the difference in how our studies
approach dystopia as a mode of thought. In order to parallel the intentional communities which
have functioned as “real” utopias, Claeys asserts that history contains “real” dystopias as well –
hence his “natural” history. This extends, first and foremost, to the totalitarian state. On my
argument, it would make more sense to say that totalitarian states were construed in dystopian
terms – that is, as foreboding a dystopian future. This is because my study foregrounds the
imaginary and critical aspects of dystopia:
 Even where they occur in the course of serious attempts at descriptive or predictive social
thought, dystopias always project beyond factual circumstances. Dystopias may project real
possibilities, but they are nonetheless concerned with the possible as against the actual. For
example, I do not aim to show that totalitarian regimes are real dystopias, or that empirical
accounts of such regimes belong to the canon of dystopian thought. Totalitarianism features in the
dystopian imagination to the extent that analysts fixate on a possibility for total control which has
not been realized in practice and may not even be realizable in principle.

 Moreover, when the emphasis is put on dystopian thinking, that is, the distinctive acts of political
imagination which the writers of dystopia engage in, we must note that dystopias are forms of
social criticism. In this sense, the design of totalitarian institutions would not qualify as
dystopian, because the architects of such institutions advanced them in earnest – not to satirize
the current social order or to warn against its future trajectory.

Finally, my study emphasizes the modernity of dystopia, which Claeys study obscures. I take it
to be a distinguishing feature of dystopias that they did not occur until the late nineteenth century
(in contrast to the long history of utopian speculation), whereas Claeys includes a number of pre-
modern antecedents both real (prisons, inquisitions) and imaginary (depictions of hell, medieval
bestiaries) under the heading. While the connections between these various forms are highly
interesting, the concept of dystopia loses much of its distinctiveness on such an account.

Professional Experience:
This project draws on my training in history of political thought and my long-standing interest in
the intersections between politics and literature. The current iteration project has evolved out of
my dissertation research at Duke University, completed in 2017. In that time, I have been
teaching writing courses at Harvard University, including a seminar on Orwell’s 1984. Working
chapters from the manuscript have been presented at annual meetings of the Association for
Political Theory, the American Political Science Association, the Midwest Political Science
Association, and the Society for Utopian Studies. I have also served as a chair and discussant on
panels related to Arendt’s political thought and political memory in film and TV at the Midwest
Political Science Association.
Some of my work on the ethical dimensions of contemporary dystopian fiction can be seen in:

 “Dystopia, Apocalypse, and Other Things to Look Forward To: Reading for Radical Hope in the
Fiction of Fear,” in Representations of Political Resistance and Emancipation, eds. Judith Grant
and Sean Parson (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020), pp. 13-32.

More information about my research and teaching, including a full CV, is available at
scholar.harvard.edu/mbenjamincole.