The role of the intellectual in “backward”— that is, largely non-industrial—societies has been one of the major themes of the twentieth century. This is not surprising, since no previous period of history has opened the road to power to so many practitioners of ideas—though in societies in which literacy has been rather problematical. As a matter of fact, one of the principal ways the “underdeveloped” (or, as we now say, “developing”) world differs from Western Europe and the United States is the almost sacerdotal role assigned to individual writers, poets, playwrights, historians, and philosophers. The contrast between that situation and our own could not be starker, and it provokes much anguish in our literary papers. Look at Senegal, we are typically reproached by critics of our own (rather less philosophical) political class, there they have (or had) a poet for a president! Or at Nicaragua, whose vice-president is Sergio Ramírez, a novelist!

But in fact the greater deference due certain individual intellectuals in particular countries should not be viewed with unrestrained enthusiasm. In places where ideas are regarded as weapons, those in power typically feel the need for a monopoly of force. This explains why non-Western societies, including societies ruled by poets and novelists, more frequently engage in censorship than those governed by the cultural laity, or why they are more inclined to jail, persecute, or exile their intellectuals. In those countries, an intellectual’s youthful militancy often dies in disillusionment and the embrace of actively anti-political attitudes; what