Democracy in Modern Iran: Islam, Culture, and Political Change

Introduction: Democracy and Culture

| 1 Introduction Democracy and Culture This book offers a sociological perspective on the history of the struggle to achieve modernity and democracy in contemporary Iran. It argues that Islam, as a religion and cultural practice, and democracy, as a nonviolent way to organize political order, are both socially rooted and can be best understood and reconciled within a sociological and institutionally grounded perspective. This contrasts with the dominant current of thought among many prominent Iranian intellectuals, a discourse which argues that “Islamic culture” rests on an archaic set of fixed ideas and beliefs inherently hostile to democratization in Iran. The thinkers of this school argue that a radical philosophical critique of the history of ideas is called for as a fundamental prerequisite both to resolve the present political crisis and ensure the future well-being of the country. The paradigm of epistemic revolution, or science pursuing absolute detachment by representing the world in terms of exactly determined particulars , was historically formulated by Enlightenment philosopher PierreSimon Laplace (1749–1827), who aimed to “embrace in the same formula the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and . . . the lightest atoms: nothing would be uncertain for it, and the future, like the past, would be present to the eyes.”1 This is an earlier variation on the Hegelian vision of Absolute Mind, or a complete scientific knowledge of the universe captured in a single perception contained in the present moment. In its political extension, the reductive program of the Laplacean fallacy based itself on comprehensive claims about the world that left no place—or need— for public liberties. Regarding political means, it entailed the violent idea that “political action is necessarily shaped by force.” This Laplacean tendency has led through a “complex historical movement . . . along a number of mutually related lines” to the “establishment in our time of the scientific method as the supreme interpreter of human affairs.” The resulting “objectivist ideal”— 2 | Introduction: Democracy and Culture based on “absolutely impersonal knowledge” or a “picture of the universe in which we ourselves are absent”—is, according to Michael Polanyi, a “menace to all cultural values, including those of science.”2 Indeed, from the Soviet experiment to the secular modernizing regime of Kemal Ataturk, the underlying Laplacean paradigm tended throughout the twentieth century to produce unlimited state powers in order to permit the total reshaping of society, including its commonly held notions of truth. A program of such totalizing dimensions rejects democracy as a means— however much it envisions its actions in terms of an emancipating democratic end. This book will argue against such visions of “epistemological revolution,” instead presenting the case for a more modest sociological perspective on the politics of democratization grounded in everydayness rather than flamboyantly imagined philosophical visions of total change seeking to attack the whole design along either Heideggerian “culturalist” or “scientific” utopian lines. The first raises “culture” to an absolute political principle, while the second reduces it to a marginal “subjectivity.” By contrast, a sociological or institutional perspective would prioritize fixed and mutually reinforcing institutional arrangements guaranteeing instrumental freedoms such as: political freedom/civil rights, which provide opportunities to determine who should govern (voting rights) and the possibility of criticizing authorities (via the press, political parties, and so on); economic facilities, which provide opportunities to utilize economic resources for the purpose of consumption, production, and exchange (including distributional considerations); social opportunities, referring to arrangements for education, health care, and other factors that influence the individual’s freedom to live better; transparency guarantees, or the freedom to interact under guarantees of disclosure and lucidity to prevent corruption or financial irresponsibility; and protective security to provide a social safety net in the face of possible deprivation caused by material changes.3 Such an institutional matrix is the basis for popular political participation in government and shared power in civil society, or a democratic politics of the temporal and the everyday. Although concerned in principle with the free agency of people, such an institutional matrix is not aligned per se with a particular cultural or philosophical outlook as deciding the meaning of public life. Nor does it need to “transcend” culture. This work analyzes in detail the developments in modern Iranian thought which have created the tendency to imagine democracy and modernity philosophically in terms of total cultural transformation or epistemic rupture , and argues against this tendency. The argument presented for the role Introduction: Democracy and Culture | 3...