Passing the Torch: Iran’s 2013 Surprise, the Digital Generational Gap, and the Depoliticization of Public Intellectuals

Abstract

Scholars of the sociology of intellectuals have proposed that the decline of public intellectuals is due to two factors: the result of the professionalization of academic disciplines and political shocks in transitional societies through social movements and revolutions. Eyal and Buchholz (Annual Review of Sociology, 36, 117–137, 2010) instead argue that a new mode of intellectual intervention takes place in an “interstitial domain”; that is, a blurry space between the political field and academia. Absent in the literature of the sociology of intellectuals and interventions is the impact of varying perceptions of regime dynamics on shifting modes of political intervention that can pave the way for the depoliticization of public intellectuals. Drawing from Eyal and Buchholz, this study examines the depoliticization of public intellectuals and particularly religious public intellectuals, during Iran’s 2013 presidential race. The political authority of public intellectuals was challenged by an emergent generation of tech-savvy activists with “high journalistic profiles.” I argue that a new generation of activists intervened in the election across the overlapping space of journalism, digital activism, and political activism. As the new generation of activists “movementized” the election on Facebook—developing a different perception of the political regime and the election—against conservative candidates (“regime insiders”), they portrayed the moderate candidate as the “regime outsider.” Prominent public intellectuals framed all presidential candidates as regime insiders, however. By analyzing the “hope and despair narratives” of the 2013 election, this study relates the depoliticization of public intellectuals to digital activism of the new generation of activists to make sense of the “digital generational gap.”