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.

This chapter examines socialist-secularist intellectuals. Secularist intellectuals were noted both for their quick rise within the socialist party, which offered them newspaper editorships and Reichstag candidacies, and for their tendency to heresy. They provided many of the key figures in anarchism, revisionism and radicalism. The first section focuses on how an important oppositional movement of 1890 to 1893, the so-called “revolt of the Jungen” was led by some of the Berlin secularists introduced in Chapter 1. The Jungen have been the subject of a number of reflections on the role of intellectuals in the party; however, none of these has dealt with the secularist dimension of this conflict. By taking up this lacuna, the chapter reinterprets key aspects of the history and the theory of the intellectual. The second section of this chapter shows how Berlin secularists strategically employed heresy as a means of developing their charisma as autonomous intellectuals within the socialist milieu.

Since late antiquity, bishops have been regarded as possessing the highest authority among Christians. But there was no linear path leading there. Rather, there were different bearers of authority among Christians: James, as the respected brother of Jesus, was a key figure at the beginning; intellectuals were able to gain importance as teachers, prophets also appeared after Jesus, among them many women; widows and virgins attained a special position; finally, the authority of ascetics increased. Basically, authority could be derived from an office within the church or from personal charisma, which was considered God given. Good bishops tried to combine both, but charismatics could always challenge them and would continue to do so throughout the history of Christianity.

This chapter shows how the crisis of the early 1920s and the intellectual relief that followed were essential to shaping European discourses about intellectuals and their roles in democratic societies. It begins by exploring well-known inter-war polemics by Julien Benda, Karl Mannheim, and Antonio Gramsci against the social backdrop of intellectual crisis and reconstruction. The chapter centres on Geneva as a crucible for bureaucracy and home to bodies that sought to categorize and organize international intellectual life. The chapter shows how a wide range of national and international organizations emerged in the 1920s to codify and protect the status of intellectuals and intellectual workers, and argues that all of this activity was motivated and conditioned by the post-war humanitarian crisis. While, by the late 1920s, the rights of intellectuals were increasingly – but unevenly – protected by international legislation, the rise of totalitarianism showed the vulnerability of intellectuals.

Post-First World War intellectual relief failed; violence against intellectuals and sites of learning proved to be a reality of modern warfare, as demonstrated by attacks on universities in the Spanish Civil War and the Sino-Japanese War, and the flight of intellectuals both within and from Europe after 1933. The symbolically rebuilt library at Louvain was destroyed again in 1940 during the Second World War. Meanwhile, the rise of totalitarianism showed that intellectuals were not bulwarks of democracy as post-war rhetoric had implied. The epilogue shows how post-First World War intellectual relief influenced the rescue of intellectuals fleeing Nazi persecution as well as the way in intellectual life was rebuilt following the Second World War, notably through the establishment of UNESCO. The reconstruction of intellectual life after the Great War continues to resonate in the twenty-first century.