The introduction opens by asking the reader to rethink modernism’s relationship to liberal world order and liberalism itself. It outlines the involvement of a wide range of modernists with mechanisms of liberal world governance. After defining interwar liberalism and laying out the central terms and methodology of the book, the introduction engages that framework in a reading of James Joyce’s first draft of “A Portrait.” The introduction concludes by formalizing the argument that will be developed in the following readings: modernists ordered and were ordered by the liberal institutions of the interwar period, a dialectical relationship that informs the politics and aesthetics of their time and ours.