Farzin Vahdat, God and Juggernaut: Iran's Intellectual Encounter with Modernity (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002). 265 pages.

There are some questions that dominate reflection on Iranian politics. These questions include at least these three:

1. Why did democracy fail to take hold in the early 20^th century despite two popular democratic movements?

2. And regardless, why did secularism fail to take hold as it did in so many other third world societies?

3. And last, how does one understand the significance and aftermath of the Islamic revolution in light of the first two failures?

To answer these questions, scholars have adopted two typical strategies. Positivist social scientists study the social and political movements, explaining their causes, showing their failures, and identifying or predicting their effects on Iranian society. Interpretive scholars evaluate the writings of Iranian intellectuals and leaders themselves, considering their reflections on these central questions of Iranian politics.

But if Vahdat is not the first to take up the three questions I outlined, he does so in a very particular way that deserves attention. Underlying Vahdat's approach is a commitment to a different way of doing social investigation. It is not concerned with explaining, controlling and predicting phenomena. It is not in that sense positivist. Nor is it strictly speaking an exercise in hermeneutic dialogue between texts, that is, of the "interpret and understand" variety.

Rather Vahdat is committed to critical social science. Critical social science is of course a broad school, but to situate it visavis the other schools of social science, one might say that the task of critical social science is neither to explain and control, nor interpret and understand, but to diagnose, criticize and emancipate. Examples of this school of social science include Hegelianism, Marxism, Frankfurt School critical theory, psychoanalysis and certain kinds of feminism.

Practically all critical analyses share three characteristic elements. First, they diagnose a certain troubling condition in which human beings in a place and time are trapped. This diagnosis is a comprehensive analysis, incorporating as many perspectives as possible, showing their strengths and weaknesses. As the most comprehensive account, it is also the most objective account of the logic of the situation. Second, analysts try to gain a critical purchase on the oppressive elements in the situation whether that is despotism, techonocracy, patriarchialism etc. Lastly, they typically prescribe a solution as to how these elements will be removed in light of the desire of all human beings to lead full and free lives.

What distinguishes Vahdat's book then is the approach it takes to the same materials that have been worked over by positivist and interpretive social scientists before him. Does this change how he sees the three questions? Yes, it does. Vahdat is not concerned solely with narrowly situating texts in their cultural period and sociologically analyzing social movements. Rather, movements and ideas are expressions of the inner tensions of modern consciousness as it works through Iranian society.

For example, democracy aims at expanding the space of freedom, emancipating all human beings in terms of common ideals. But to implement the will of the people, democrats must create bureaucracies. Every element of democracy, even vote counting, requires bureaucracy. Whatever laws are passed, there has to be a bureaucracy that sees that the will of the demos is done. Democracy generates in this way a group of narrow, powerful, technical experts who can undermine the universal tendencies of democracy.

Indeed, the repeated story of early modern Iranian politics, according to Vahdat, was the recession of the universalist subjectivities of modernity in the face of bureaucratic, technical, and instrumental reason. As a result, the 'nation-state' emerged not as the guarantor of the universal notion of individual rights, but as the protector of abstract collective subjects, "the Iranian people," for example, in whose name the state undermined individual freedoms.

This understanding changes how Vahdat presents intellectuals and social movements. Vahdat interrogates authors from the standpoint of the fundamental tensions of modernity. He asks how thinkers from Talibuf to Sorush grapple with the fundamental tensions between positivist technical interest and emancipatory interest, individual freedom and collective subjectivity. Likewise, with respect to social movements, these movements are not merely simply armies randomly clashing in the dark night, arbitrary conflicts between ambitious individuals. On the contrary, the conflicts express the fundamental logical contradictions in modernity itself.

Why do secularism and democracy fail in modern Iran? As I have suggested, their failure has to do with their inability in the Iranian case to come to terms with the powerful technocratic impulse of modernity on the one hand, and their inability, on the other, to root themselves solidly in the emancipatory interests – the universal subjectivities. And this was because the bearers of these emancipatory interests were often too rooted in narrow, isolated elites with little interest in or relationship to the broad masses of people. But for Vahdat, these don't constitute failures in a strict sense, because they yielded inadvertently other developments, such as the Islamic revolution, which ironically produced both a broad empancipatory movement and a powerful critique of technocratic modernity.

For Vahdat, historical reason is cunning, and what he sees is that Iranian intellectual and social history expresses a deep pattern, a one that develops according to a certain cumulative logic. Critical social science reveals this pattern not because it has a secret tool ("dialectics"), but because of its comprehensive handle on the aporias of modernity. Positivist social scientists, with their focus on technical mastery and power, will miss the meaning of these events. Interpretive social scientists, with their focus on cultural meaning, present these events far too narrowly and miss their world historical significance.

For Vahdat, what makes the Iranian case "unique" compared to all other countries is "its preoccupation with the metaphysical foundations of modernity" (p. 212). In Iran, perhaps unlike anywhere else, Iranians have had to grapple with the ontological and metaphysical foundations of modernity. I don't think anyone would question that the emergence of a religiously led revolution in the late twentieth century raised some fundamental questions about modernization, secularization and a host of other sociological tendencies of modernity.

But Vahdat goes further. What Vahdat argues is that the Islamic dimension of the 1979 Revolution was neither anomaly nor illusion. It was rather a unique and genuine attempt to come to terms with the fundamental tensions that bedevilled Liberal, Marxist, Socialist and secular conservative thought for the early part of the century. Islamic discourse was rooted itself in a universal subjectivity, however mediated, and carried by a group with broad social roots and this in turn allowed it to generate some unexpected strengths visavis the Juggernaut of modernity, particular its most vicious technical and positivistic moments.

It was in this respect a "philosophical revolution" if one may call it that even if the rank and file did not realize they were tangling with the fundamental aporias of modernity. Likewise, the 1979 revolution was not traditional or atavistic, but incorporated and transformed the fundamental problem of modernity. Indeed, Vahdat sees the tensions between technocratic/positivist and humanist/emancipatory elements remanifested on a new playing field in the works of Davari-Ardakani and Sorush.

For Vahdat then, Iranian history isn't simply "news" or "history" but a logical movement of consciousness. Thus the new democratic and technocratic tendencies today play out the inevitable tensions of modernity. It is the irony of the revolution that by bringing about a new way of talking about modernity, the very leaders seem to become increasingly irrelevant to the outcome of modernity.

Scholars of an interpretive bent may fault Vahdat for making too many intellectual leaps, failing to clarify more carefully the cultural context of the ideas. Likewise positivist scholars may fault Vahdat for a tendency to make social movements the effect of the logical progression of modernity, rendering ordinary human actions an effect of the movement of thought. These are old debates, even if they will take a particularly Iranian form in this case, but critical social science has long worked out replies to these sorts of criticisms.

But there is a more critical problem with Vahdat's argument. Vahdat says "For modernity to be fully realized in Iran, however, the mediated subjectivity of the Islamic discourse and movement must eventually be replaced by a direct form of subjectivity. This would entail the inevitable problems associated with monadic subjectivity experienced in the modern west" (p. 217). If I read the second sentence correctly, Vahdat's analysis of modernity is not characterized by a single inexorable logic regardless of social context. It is not, because Vahdat seems to think that Iran may or may not adopt a Western modernity, with the kind of attendant problems of modernity that characterize the lives we live here.

On the other hand, the first sentence seems to be genuinely ambivalent here as to the teleological thrust of modernity. I cannot tell whether he thinks modernity will inevitably be realized or whether the sentence should read, "If [Western] modernity is to be fully realized in Iran." This is no trivial difference. One suggests the movement of thought, as Vahdat sees it, is an inevitable one towards modernity and the other suggests that that is a hypothetical possibility but that that modernity could go in some dramatically alternative direction. It would suggest that there is some element of unreason and illogic in history, something postmodernist would be quite happy to acknowledge but sheer anathema to critical social scientists. For it would suggest that the concept of modernity is far broader than the one imagined in critical social science.

Again, earlier Vahdat says "Whether this transformation will take place, and a full-blown universal subjectivity emerge, will depend to a large extent on which elements take the upper hand – those supporting universalizable subjectivity or those opposing it" (p. 180). At this point, one must wonder whether Vahdat's analysis is based on a logic that presumably heads towards emancipatory results – as in all critical social science – or whether the analysis has given way suddenly to a lost faith, in which chance outcomes interfere in the order of history.

The tension is not simply limited to these few sentences. In the second half of the book, Vahdat's fundamental concept is the notion of "mediated subjectivity" which he defines as "human subjectivity projected onto the attributes of the monotheistic deity - attributes such as omnipotence, omniscience and volition – and then partially reappropriated by humans" (p. 134). This is powerfully Feuerbachian language. But in Feuerbach's theses on religion, there was an inevitable movement of modernity toward a key moment in which humans wrested back from God the qualities that were rightfully theirs and had been alienated by the development of religious consciousness. Feuerbach's heirs had confidence in that great Promethean moment – one which Marx expresses so keenly in his notion of species being - that through collective work and social life, human beings would become omnipotent and transform the world.

On Feuerbach's view, religious discourse is overcome by secularism; secularism simply understands modernity better. Yet, Vahdat forcefully claims that religiously mediated consciousness in Iran represents a logical step forward in modern consciousness over the earlier secular movements and ideas. These early notions failed because they could not grapple with modernity in a genuine way. The new religiously mediated consciousness does, though it is by no means a stable mix of elements. Suppose one grants this; does this mean that, as in Feuerbach, Iranians will wrest these qualities back in the next step? Vahdat seems genuinely uncertain, and given his commitment to critical social science, he cannot afford to be. His uncertainty would no doubt raise eyebrows among many critical social scientists.

It is one thing to combine critical theory with a hermeneutic affirmation of Islamic religious thought as a step forward in modern consciousness. One can regard this as a passing stage on the way to full blown modernity as in the West. But when one hedges one's bets, when combines these two elements with an agnosticism about the logic, cumulative effect or dialectical thrust (substitute whatever language one cares to) of modernity itself, then one has to wonder about the analytical coherence of this mix of elements. There is no getting around this, or at least it would involve a very long philosophical walk through some pretty tough territory. Thus while Vahdat goes in as a critical theorist, I am not entirely certain that after his intellectual encounter with Iran he has emerged as one.

Actually, I think Vahdat is right about Iran and in a way that undermines the critical heritage he is committed to. No one I think can predict in our uncertain times what the outcome of the Iranian encounter with modernity will be. A US invasion of Iran would certainly be a remarkable testament to technocratic tendencies of modernity, a victory for Juggernaut. And possibly also a victory for Christian fundamentalism, as bin Ladin and his friends have often alleged.

Perhaps the darkest picture of all is one we can take from Adorno, a negative dialectics, in which both East and West encompass each other's modernity as well as their opposites. On one side, we have an American modernity that is ostensibly secular, universalistic and technocratic while compatible with a powerful revival of Christian fundamentalism. On the other, we have an Islamic Iranian state that also seems to generate its own internal tendencies towards technocracy, secularism and universalism. As Adorno would have said, in any opposition, one can find in each element, the same opposition.

This would suggest that history does not have the kind of positive dialectical buildup aspired for those committed to critical social science in whatever form. While there is a pattern, it is one of increasing fragmentation and division, a profoundly non-teleological and darker view of the world we live in than the one critical theory draws.

 

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