Hidden Liberalism Burdened Visions of Progress in Modern Iran

Compared to rival ideologies, liberalism has fared rather poorly in modern Iran. This is all the more remarkable given the essentially liberal substance of various social and political struggles ? for liberal legality, individual rights and freedoms, and pluralism ? in the century-long period since the demise of the Qajar dynasty and the subsequent transformation of the country into a modern nation-state. The deeply felt but largely invisible purchase of liberal political ideas in Iran challenges us to think more expansively about the trajectory of various intellectual developments since the emergence of a movement for reform and constitutionalism in the late nineteenth century. It complicates parsimonious accounts of Shi'ism, secularism, socialism, nationalism, and royalism as defining or representative ideologies of particular eras. Hidden Liberalism offers a critical examination of the reasons behind liberalism's invisible yet influential status, and its attendant ethical quandaries, in Iranian political and intellectual discourses.

1. Introduction: hidden liberalism; 2. Aspects of political liberalism in Iran; 3. The specter of westernism; 4. Liberation without liberalism; 5. Conclusion: (in)visible liberalisms.

Hussein Banai is Assistant Professor of International Studies in the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington, and Research Affiliate at the Center for International Studies at MIT. He is co-author of Becoming Enemies: US-Iran Relations and the Iran-Iraq War, 1980-1988 (2012) and currently serves as Associate Editor (for Social Sciences) of Iranian Studies, the journal of the Association for Iranian Studies. His writings on Iran's political development and foreign relations have been published in in academic, policy, and popular periodicals.