Matthew is an historian specialising in intellectual history and the history of political thought. He has a particular interest in the development of anarchism as a political tradition, and his first book, described in the American Historical Review as an ‘innovative intellectual history of British anarchism,’ focused on the work of Peter Kropotkin and Herbert Read.
Matthew has published on parallel themes in a number of intellectual history and history of political thought journals including Journal of the History of Ideas, History of Political Thought, History of European Ideas, Journal of Political Ideologies, Intellectual History Review, Historical Research, Political Research Exchange, and Forum for Modern Language Studies.
He has also co-edited a number of books including The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) with Carl Levy; Anarchism, 1914-1918: Internationalism, Anti-militarism and War(Manchester University Press, 2017) with Ruth Kinna; and three volumes of Essays in Anarchism and Religion (Stockholm University Press, 2020, 2018, 2017) with Alexandre Christoyannopoulos. He also recently contributed an introduction to a new edition of Marie Louise Berneri’s Journey through Utopia published by PM Press. Matthew is co-editor of the journal Anarchist Studies.
He is currently working on two book projects. The first, The Ideas Factory: Radical Cultural Politics and the Anarchist Public Intellectual, focuses on the work of, amongst others, Alex Comfort, Paul Goodman, Dwight Macdonald, Ethel Mannin, and George Woodcock, examining the development of anarchist cultural politics in a transatlantic milieu during the Cold War. Recreating the intellectual networks between Britain, Canada and the US that united them, the book also explores the idea of the anarchist public intellectual as a forgotten voice in Cold War intellectual life.
The second, Anarchic Virtues, offers a new history of anarchist political thought that recovers the roles of responsibility and duty as defining characteristics of the tradition. What this shows, the book argues, is the defining relation of anarchism to the republican tradition, and especially how republican visions of ‘civic virtue’ that its theorists saw as essential to political communities where sovereignty lay, at least nominally, in the citizenry, also informed anarchism’s emergence as an ideology.
