This chapter discusses how Carnap’s philosophy of language affects his position on language planning issues. Carnap was an Esperantist from an early age, and he kept his interest for international auxiliary languages active throughout his life. In his Intellectual Autobiography, he clearly mentions the relation between his activity of building symbol systems as a logician and his interest for language planning for international communication. His controversy with Wittgenstein regarding Esperanto illustrates two opposing views of language, one as a functional device for various purposes and one as a carrier of tradition and identity. Carnap’s dismissal of the latter is rooted both in his principle of tolerance (and its underlying instrumentalism) and in logical empiricism’s attack on metaphysical concepts such as Volksgeist, shared by other language planners who emphasized the instrumental purpose of language and supported locutors’ active intervention in it either by language reform or by language construction. We argue that the antimetaphysical rejection of the romanticist view of language, sustained by Vienna Circle, led to a more liberal and flexible attitude toward language planning issues. Finally, the internationalism of logical empiricists was effective in shaping their favourable disposition towards international auxiliary languages.

With a view to highlighting the importance of archival and less well-known primary sources for our understanding of Rudolf Carnap’s philosophy, this chapter investigates several examples of concrete influences on his thinking, from nineteenth-century Herbartianism and empiriocriticism, the German Youth Movement, Bauhaus modernism and the revolution from the right, toward the Vienna Circle and post-WWII analytic philosophy. These examples demonstrate that Carnap’s philosophy had always been shaped by practical motives; he developed a philosophical stance that is directed at the reality of life and integrates cognitive as well as non-cognitive elements. This meta-philosophical view that carefully investigates the borders between the scientifically comprehensible (viz., the cognitive) and those aspects of reasoning that merely comprise personal attitudes (viz. the noncognitive) developed through various stages, from the "scientific world-conception" and antimetaphysics of the Vienna Circle toward Carnap’s mature views on inductive logic and human decision-making. The upshot is that noncognitivism as being understood by Carnap and his philosophical allies rather than denouncing value statements as arbitrary and irrational embeds them into a rational scientific discourse, to maximize rationality in connection with moral and political decision making.

“Print” analyzes the transition from manuscript to print culture and the formal conventions of modern Persianate writing. I trace the emergence and standardization of standard typography, orthography, and punctuation. Questioning the assumption that these aspects of print culture arose organically from the material conditions of modernization, I argue that they were fetishized as a kind of modernizing technology in and of themselves, and understood as productive of -- rather than products of -- modernization. In other words, Iranian and Indian literary scholars sought to modernize their prose by abandoning certain formal conventions of the Persianate manuscript tradition and adopting the conventions of European print: type rather than calligraphy, standardized spelling, and a new set of punctuation marks. The transition from manuscripts to a standardized print culture is typically presented as pragmatic, but it was shaped by various networks of affective attachments.

In what ways was China’s literary modernism central to its Marxism? Despite Chinese revolutionary culture’s many twists and turns from class struggle to economic reconstruction, Marxist intellectuals in China have consistently identified Lu Xun (1881–1936), a modernist writer who never joined the CCP and dismissed its revolutionary literature as an “unfortunate confusion of guns with words,” as having drawn the blueprint of the country’s communist future. Instead of reexamining the writer’s political alignment with CCP leaders or the extent and accuracy of his knowledge of Marx, this chapter takes up the perplexing question of Lu Xun’s Marxism by recasting his modernist experimentations with irony, rhetorical displacement, and metafictional excess as the construction of a materialist aesthetics centered on disposable populations that appear, at first, either independent of capital–labor relations or anterior to primitive accumulation in the beginning years of China’s traumatic incorporation into the world capitalist system.

This chapter rewrites the history of Egypt’s constitutional period (1923–1952) by examining a ‘culture war’ that broke out between graduates of Dar al-ʿUlum and Europhile modernist intellectuals such as Muhammad Husayn Haykal, Taha Husayn, and ʿAli ʿAbd al-Raziq. From 1930, Europhile modernist calls for westernisation fell on deaf ears due in large part to the darʿamiyya. Darʿamiyya continued to exercise significant influence over the teaching and reform of Arabic, including as members of the Royal Arabic Language Academy (Majmaʿ al-Lugha al-ʿArabiyya) from 1932. Furthermore, darʿamiyya Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb of the Muslim Brotherhood and Taqi al-Din al-Nabhani of Hizb al-Tahrir advanced explicitly Islamic alternatives to state-led projects of modernity. Their example established a new mode of religious leadership, the new religious intellectual, available to individuals without significant religious education. Europhile modernists responded differently to this loss of sociocultural authority. Haykal’s switch to writing about Islamic topics can be seen as an attempt to co-opt darʿami influence over popular views of religion. Husayn’s call for Dar al-ʿUlum to be subsumed into the Egyptian University’s College of Literature was a direct attack on the darʿamiyya’s sociocultural and professional authority.