"Will be of interest to those who are open to unlearn narratives of a monolithic body of these ideas and are, instead, amenable to embrace possibilities of their diachronic evolution and multiple genealogies, their ambiguities and fluctuations."

The Telegraph (India)

"Much has been written on nineteenth-century Hindu reformers. Scott’s intervention in this discourse, however, is unique and stimulating; written through the lens of postmodernism and using English, Hindi, and Gujarati writings. Scott effectively provides new insights into the role of these reformers and their connections to ideas and theorists beyond the subcontinent, thereby going beyond the boundaries of nation and culture. This intellectual history will be essential for the student and scholar of neo-Vedanta and modern Hinduism."

Journal of the American Academy of Religion

“Scott’s wholly original and highly intellectual work contributes to the current discourses on the autonomous subject of liberalism in South Asian studies and religious studies. It is essential reading for those interested in understanding the development of modern Hinduism and the production of the Hindu liberal, self-ruling subject within a global context of appropriation, reformation, and secularization.”

International Journal of Hindu Studies

“Spiritual Despots is a valuable and quite unusual intellectual history centered on the idea of “priestcraft;” an important subject, though sorely neglected in recent academic scholarship. Scott offers a substantial contribution to the new trend in intellectual history that tries to breach the boundaries of national space and pursue movements of thought across spatial and cultural boundaries. Interesting and persuasive, Spiritual Despots poses a significant methodological revision for this type of intellectual history; it shifts comparatively back and forth between Indian thought on religious reform and contemporary British discussion on the nature of religiosity under conditions of modernity. Written clearly and with precision, Spiritual Despots will be indispensable to academic circles in Indian intellectual history, religious thought, and social scientists engaged in rethinking theories of secularization.”

Sudipta Kaviraj, Columbia University

“This wholly original book offers us a sophisticated account of the making of a new kind of spiritual and political subject in colonial India. Scott argues that the modern Hindu self is produced within a global context in which the autonomous subject of liberalism is questioned and undermined. He elegantly shows how this results in a subjectivity defined by self-rule as a form of splitting and self-referentiality that eventually provides the foundation for an anticolonial politics that was at the same time a practice of psychic revolution.”

Faisal Devji, University of Oxford

“Spiritual Despots is an intelligent contribution to several ongoing conversations in religious studies and South Asian studies. Scott’s argument is sophisticated and clearly written, and he approaches several ‘big questions’ associated with various works of Max Weber, Michel Foucault, and Charles Taylor from a novel perspective. Spiritual Despots will be of interest to any scholar of religious studies, South Asian studies, intellectual history, or comparative political theorists.”

Andrew Sartori, New York University