Ali Mirsepassi. Iran’s Quiet Revolution: The Downfall of the Pahlavi State.

Abstract

Iran’s intellectual encounter with modernity in the twentieth century and turn to Islamism around the Iranian Revolution (1978–1979) have animated vigorous scholarly debates, to which Ali Mirsepassi has made stimulating and provocative contributions. In four previous monographs, starting with ­Intellectual ­Discourse and the Politics of Modernization: ­Negotiating ­Modernity in Iran (2000) to Transnationalism in Iranian Political Thought: The Life and Times of Ahmad Fardid (2017), he has developed a singular argument: the prerevolutionary ­“anti-modern” and ­“anti-Western” discourse of “authenticity” and ­“nativism” among Iranian intellectuals was largely influenced by the German ­philosopher Martin ­Heidegger, and these works paved the way for the ­Islamist turn of the Iranian Revolution. Iran’s Quiet Revolution further develops this argument with a crucial twist: “anti-Western nativism” was not only cultivated and popularized by oppositional intellectuals but also by state elites and institutions. While the Pahlavi state pursued “a Western and modernist model in economic and...