Chapter 4 considers the project of worldmaking and the concept of personality from the perspective of two prose genres that dominated Yeats’s writing in the 1920s and 1930s: autobiography and occult philosophy. My justification for bringing these genres together lies in an understanding of how they are used in his exploration of personality and aesthetic Bildung. The logic of misrecognition can be discerned not only in Yeats’s growing understanding of the self/anti-self dichotomy but also in the the process by which he learns, at the hands of sometimes deceptive instructors, the secrets of the spirit world. Yeats’s spiritual journey in A Vision frames a cosmic system in which personality, understood as a dialectics of self and anti-self, defines many of the historical figures who exemplify the phases of the moon. In Autobiographies, he becomes increasingly aware of the need to document his own personality with the rectifying aim of discovering the “age-long memoried self” that coexists with his ordinary “daily self” (Au 216). Each text creates in its own fashion the contours and atmosphere of a world in which the past – on the one hand, through recollection; on the other, through an understanding of the historical gyres – retains its vitality and presentness.

In the conclusion, I reflect on Yeats’s “A General Introduction for my Work” of 1937. It is an unusual text, meant originally to introduce his collected works but left unpublished until the posthumous Essay and Introductions (1961). It leads a negative dialectical existence, severed from its original place and left to perform a fugitive function with respect to the poet’s own oeuvre. For this reason, perhaps, it serves less as an introduction than as an epilogue, a summation of certain key ideas about revivalism, his poetry, and his occult works. Yeats sees from the vantage point of his later years that his literary style – as well as the worlds it creates in his work – could only have emerged from the bedrock of the self. Two years after Yeats composed his “General Introduction,” W. H. Auden, in his elegy “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” wrote that after his death, the poet “is scattered among a hundred cities,” part of a vital future he had to leave behind: “The words of a dead man /Are modified in the guts of the living.” It is just this sort of continuance and renewal that characterize Yeats’s revivalism and his hope for coming times.

In the introduction, I argue that Yeats’s revivalism, far from being prior to or separate from his modernism, is in fact a principal component of it. This claim is based on new research on revivalism as a movement and a way of thinking about Ireland, its past, and its future. My theoretical point of view is determined by three intertwined concepts: recognition, temporality, and the world of the work of art. The concepts of recognition and misrecognition, as I use them, derive from Hegel’s philosophy and are fundamental to his dialectical method. I explore at length Mikel Dufrenne’s phenomenological concept of worldmaking, according to which the aesthetic object consists of a represented and an expressed world. The dialectical relation of these two worlds in the work of art led to the creation of new time signatures, new ways of accounting for time beyond the limits of historical thinking. These innovations, which I argue are characteristic of Yeats’s revivalism and his modernism, sanction, through artistic means, the creation of new histories and stories for understanding Ireland’s past. They also sanction the creation of new worlds – possible and impossible – in art and other cultural forms. Yeats’s work, propelled by a lifelong commitment to revivalism, introduces into modernism a constellation of new worlds.

Chapter 2 focuses on the early poetry and drama, in which Yeats discovers the worldmaking potential of art and creates at least two kinds of autonomous imaginary worlds: an impossible one based on the otherworld of faery, a parallel world of nonhuman beings and magical practices, and a possible one based on the private world of the lover and beloved, a world created in the artistic recasting of memory and desire. In the poetry, temporality is recursive and generative, with aspects of the past and future arranged in a nested fashion so that temporal moments are embedded in one another and, in a sense, produce one another. The early drama tends to express this tensed temporality in terms of the confrontation between two worlds: the actual world and the faery otherworld. These tensed temporalities enable both an accommodation of what is outside the realm of human experience and a renewed sense of the nature and limits of that experience. Misprision – the strange deceptions of the faery otherworld on the one hand and the recollected fantasies that structure so many of the early poems on the other – characterizes these new temporal arrangements.

This chapter briefly surveys the intellectual history of modern, western counterinsurgency theory, as conservative, high modernist utopianism. It sets out concise and synoptic evidence for the argument, which serves as context for the later case chapters. I focus on counterinsurgency manuals—applied theoretical texts written by counterinsurgency practitioners, aiming to shape battlefield and political conduct. Manuals link theory and practice, connecting idealized military and political theory to the history of on-the-ground conduct. My approach is primarily contextualist. Proceeding chronologically, I draw connections and contrasts between canonical manuals, from the early modern period to the present. While small wars or counterinsurgency manuals were conservative from early on, high modernism and utopianism emerged only gradually and incidentally, taking multiple forms. I show how ideas cross-pollinated across texts, accumulating scattershot political idealizations and military practices alike. In so doing, I link micro-level individual intellectual change with larger historical processes, at the global level.

The concluding chapter reviews the book’s findings, then considers implications for ongoing conflicts globally. Counterinsurgency and cognate ideas, I argue, are likely to persist, whatever their past failures and ambivalent reception. I consider potential future developments, in a period of reactionary politics and “the empire come home.” Alternatives are nonetheless possible.

This chapter introduces the study and sets out a framework for investigating counterinsurgency’s intellectual history. I argue late twentieth and early twenty-first century counterinsurgency is a form of conservative, high modern utopianism. It is conservative in aiming to protect a given status quo against revolution or other transformative change. Counterinsurgency is “high modernist” in James C. Scott’s sense: it imagines a linear, schematized world, effacing local difference and resistance—in line with modern ideologies of progress. It is utopian in aiming to (re)make not actually existing systems and practices, but instead the idealized preferences of their elites, shorn of compromise, incidental variation, and historical specificity. Counterinsurgencies are thus conservative worldmaking projects: attempts to reimagine and reorder the world, in response to insurrection. The book’s purpose is the explain how this configuration of armed politics arose. To do so, it focuses on counterinsurgency manuals: the military theoretical and instructional texts designed to make counterinsurgency doable in practice.

This essay develops a literary history of the concept “world” in the early modern period, suggesting that particular literary strategies—speculation, scalar juxtaposition, allegory, philology, and lexical play—became integral to imagining, naming, and shaping a particular vision of “world” across a range of media. Through a comparative study of European and South Asian examples, it shows how worldmaking literature in the early modern period can be characterized by “cartographic poesis,” that is, an intent to shape and represent the idea “world,” to bring it into being as a coherent concept and category. It further explores words for “world” and their significations across a range of languages and cultural contexts, highlighting how literature may be a crucial resource for envisioning ideas of global totality.