Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization Negotiating Modernity in Iran by 'Ali Mrsepassi, Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xiv+ 193 pages. Notes top. 215. Bib{. to pages 223. lndex top. 227.

Abstract

This book examines the Islamic revolution of Iran and presents a cultural
approach to analyzing the events that resulted in the collapse of the
monarchical system and the establishment of the Islamic Republic.
The book contains seven chapters. An introductory chapter explores the
genealogy of the western narrative of modernity and its dichotomizing
representation of non-western cultures and societies. The author poses
several questions in an attempt to provide a definition for modernity, and in
the process explores the story of Iranian modernity. Is modernity a
totalizing ideology grounded in European cultural and moral experience
and incapable of understanding other cultures? Or, is it a mode of social and
cultural experience of the present that is open to all forms of contemporary
experiences and possibilities?
These questions are addressed in chapter 1, where Mirsepassi examines
the process of development of the concept of modernity in the West. He
analyzes some of the writings of such thinkers as Montesquieu, Hegel, Karl
Marx, Max Weber, Emmile Durkheim, Marshall Berman, Jurgen
Habermas, Anthony Giddens, and more recent works by critics of
modernity theories such as Edward Sai'd, Arturo Escobar, and Timothy
Mitchell. He demonstrates quite convincingly, how in the western
conception of modernity, an "Oriental" other, passive, traditional, and
irrational, is contrasted to the modem world of the West. At the depth of the
discourse of modernity, he finds a hostility to non-western cultures that
excludes them from the possibility of meaningful participation in the
making of the modem world. He criticizes the western conception of
modernity because it is Euro-centric and denies other cultures a positive
role in the making of the modem world. These theories all share the belief
that "they are objective, culturally neutral, and universally applicable to all
societies." (pp. 6-9) Therefore, the core conception of modernity theory ...