This article investigates the political role of social theories in contemporary Iran. It focuses, specifically, on how the 1979 Revolution marks a passage in Iranian political and social thought from political radicalism informed by Marxism to reformist liberalism inspired by local readings of Weber, Habermas, and Giddens. By investigating the writings of public intellectuals and political activists involved in Iran’s reform movement, the article traces their transformation from leftist revolutionary radicals to liberal proponents of free market, democracy, and religious pluralism. (...) It will be argued that an inadequate understanding of economic issues underlies the political failings of this movement. (shrink)

This thesis offers a systematic analysis of the ideological structure in the Islamic Republic of Iran through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalytic critique of ideology. The Lacanian emphasis on the libidinal constitution of ideology changes the object of analysis from social reality in its empirical aspects to the unconscious or disavowed conditions sustaining social reality in the Islamic Republic. The overall analysis of this thesis is divided into three interrelated research domains: the first domain of political subjectivity examines how subjectivity (...) in Iran is embedded in the ideological order, as well as how that order was constructed through the 1979 Islamic revolution by tapping into the unconscious agency of political subjectivity; the second theologico-political domain inquires into the form of ideology materialised in the socio-political framework of the Islamic Republic and analyses its libidinal sustainability; the third domain explores the political economy in Iran by conflating its historical and ontological inquiry. The analysis of the three domains helps me to discern the inherent contradictions of the ideological structure in contemporary Iran and the peculiar way these contradictions are mediated. Their mediation conversely ensures the reproduction of ideology on an unconscious level. This thesis therefore explores how ideology in the Islamic Republic of Iran enables a consistent experience of social reality and how subjectivity sustains the ideological order through libidinal investments. (shrink)