The half-century prior to 1914 was not just a belle époque of world fairs and art nouveau; it was also a period of increasingly contentious international relations, characterized by the developing force of public opinion. Patriotic humanities scholars acquired a new role as public intellectuals, ‘explaining the ways of history to men’. The French–German debates over Germany’s annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871 were a formative moment in the longer time-frame of alternating lost wars between 1804 and 1918, marking the crystallization of French revanchism and German triumphalism. These debates became the breeding ground, paradoxically, both of Ernest Renan’s seminal and still authoritative ‘voluntaristic’ theory of national identity and of a type of chauvinistic propaganda that reached almost hysterical levels in 1914. The fervent jingoism of the Great War, fomented and rationalized by learned disquisitions from prestigious academics, marks the zenith of nationalism as a force in European relations. One committed participant, Emile Durkheim, recognized that self-righteous patriotism could lead to something like national narcissism.

This chapter examines the post-independence cultural policy debates in Algeria. Following independence in 1962, Algeria emerged as a leader of the Global South but struggled internally to chart a path to “recover its personality” from French colonialism. In the periodical Révolution Africaine, FLN party intellectuals attempted to shape the state’s cultural policy. This periodical hosted a series of debates and acrimonious exchanges which involved Mostefa Lacheraf and Mourad Bourboune, and after the 1965 military coup, Malek Bennabi and Ahmed Taleb. These debates appeared to center on whether bilingualism or Arabization would best serve Algeria’s modernization and its cultural revival. Yet, this chapter argues, all of these interventions left untouched key notions of “backwardness” in their policy proposals, all of which had been inherited from the colonial period. As such, Algerian attempts to leap into independence were frustrated by its leaders prioritizing the need for action to make up for their so-called historical delay. This chapter also contextualizes Algerian cultural debates in its North African framework while reflecting on how this periodical was initially able to host these debates until it was co-opted by state imperatives.

This essay explores the evolution of the discourse of leadership in pre-imperial (pre-221 bc) China. I show how the formation of the ideology of monarchism during the formative age of traditional Chinese culture was accompanied by subtle bifurcation between the concept of the ruler and that of the leader. Chinese intellectuals of what is often dubbed the age of the Hundred Schools of Thought agreed that the monarch should possess absolute power, but they had carefully shaped the monarch’s image in the way that allowed much leverage to the members of their own stratum. A subtle and yet well-pronounced bifurcation between political leadership of the monarch and the moral and intellectual leadership of an outstanding minister or an aspiring minister remained one of the major features of Chinese political thought and political culture for millennia to come.

Chapter 6 shows that Russian hawks entered the regime’s market for ideology in the years 2005–12. Transactional relations were established between modernist conservatives and the ruling party, whereby the former’s ideological discourse was sponsored as a strategic resource for the regime’s legitimation against oppositional forces and for its distinction against the Western model of liberal democracy. In 2012, the creation of the Izborskii Klub provided institutional form to this interelite network aimed at gaining policy influence over more liberal-inclined elite networks.

Chapter 4 shows how the Russian hawks’ ideas moved from the fringes to the center of the public sphere in the early 2000s. It investigates the 2001–02 controversy that surrounded the publication of a novel written by one of the most radical conservative ideologues, Aleksandr Prokhanov. It demonstrates that the controversy reconfigured the formerly consensual distinction between legitimate and transgressive public discourse. It explains that the intellectual legitimation of Prokhanov thrived on Russia’s political and intellectual elites’ backlash against the legacy of the 1990s and the standards of Western liberalism. The controversy eventually contributed to normalizing modernist conservatism, which gained a new audience among the younger generation of intellectuals.

Chapter 5 demonstrates that in the years 2000–05 a new generation of Russian hawks born around the 1970s, the “Young Conservatives,” acquired a reputation as professional media intellectuals and developed a new type of collective ideological entrepreneurship. They naturalized modernist conservatism’s eclectic blend of concepts into a full-fledged ideology, “dynamic conservatism.” Moreover, they established themselves as a legitimate stratum of Russia’s intellectual elites contributing public policy recommendations.

Expo 70 in Osaka was a watershed, in the histories of post-war Japan and of exhibitions. Following the Tokyo Olympics, it substantiated Japan’s reemergence on the international stage of the Cold War world. In time, it also proved a turning point from the productionism of the immediate post-war years to the consumerism of the 1970s and 1980s. Most significant, it confirmed the Japanese state’s embrace of mega-events as a way of implementing the national planning regime, and thereby canalizing development. This chapter explores Expo 70 in detail, situating it in both the post-war reemergence of international exhibitions around the world and the benefits and costs of high economic growth in Japan. It shows how the Expo became a magnet, for intellectuals and creatives, both for and against, and for visitors, who flocked in greater numbers than for any expo before. It also explores in detail how the expo became a media event. Newspapers and TV attested to the implacable but manifold nature of development, which was evident in the ability of the Expo to conjure infrastructure and catalyse demand, even while it accommodated a fractured world, teeming crowds, and intransigent protest.

The reformist religious intellectuals of the 1990s and the 2000s sought to articulate a new jurisprudence that drew inspiration from dynamic, reason-centered ijtihad. The characteristics of the new, reconstituted fiqh were meant to include a comprehensive research program of reformism, deconstruction of commonplace understanding of religion and religion hermeneutic, and reexamining religious experiences and expectations. It was also meant to historicize religion and reimagine jurisprudence through the application of secular and scientific tools and methods. The project’s spectacular failure, slowly made clear about a decade after its zenith in the mid-2000s, owed much to the right’s merciless and multipronged onslaught. But that failure – more accurately, its violent obstruction – did not come until after the project of deconstructing hermeneutics and ijtihad had been taken to their logical extension, namely efforts to construct a sustained theory of Islamic democracy.

The Introduction turns to Terry Eagleton’s comment on reading Naipaul (“Great art, dreadful politics”) and asks how critics have addressed this quandary about a great writer. It looks at the critical essays on Naipaul by Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, and Sara Suleri in particular to examine how Naipaul’s works challenge the idea of “postcolonial arrival.” The overall thesis of the book is summed up as a reading in which an author “reads us.” To undertake this project, the work is grounded in a systematic examination of all of the author’s published and unpublished works, the secondary bibliography, and material deposited in the Naipaul Archive, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. To make a case for Naipaul’s place in global literary culture, there are four key impulses that govern the book. They are: history, aesthetics, textual engagement, and archival knowledge. To give meaning to that achievement, this book is written with thematic unities in mind. Although chronology is not totally dispensed with, the chapters are structured with the aim of establishing connections within Naipaul’s heterogeneous corpus. But for that interconnectedness to succeed, Naipaul followed an uncompromising commitment to writing as an aesthetic endeavour, uninhibited by fashion or ideology.