In a reappraisal of Iran's modern history, Ervand Abrahamian traces its traumatic journey across the twentieth century, through the discovery of oil, imperial interventions, the rule of the Pahlavis and, in 1979, revolution and the birth of the Islamic Republic. In the intervening years, the country has experienced a bitter war with Iraq, the transformation of society under the clergy and, more recently, the expansion of the state and the struggle for power between the old elites, the intelligentsia and the commercial middle class. The author is a compassionate expositor. While he adroitly negotiates the twists and turns of the country's regional and international politics, at the heart of his book are the people of Iran. It is to them and their resilience that this book is dedicated, as Iran emerges at the beginning of the twenty-first century as one of the most powerful states in the Middle East.
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Marx, the prophet of revolution, may no longer haunt conservative politicians, but Marx, the theorist of revolution, continues to both attract and arouse social scientists. In the words of one student of politics, the social sciences, especially political sociology, can be described as a ‘century-long dialogue with Karl Marx.’ And as one prominent historian of ideas has aptly stated, Marx can properly be called the midwife of twentieth-century social thought, ‘for in the process of discarding what they had found invalid in Marxism and explaining what aspects of it had proved helpful, the innovators of the late nineteenth century took their first steps towards constructing a more general theory of social reality.’ For example, Emile Durkheim developed the paradigm of ‘mechanical and organic solidarity’ to counter the theory of class struggle. Vilfred Pareto and Gaetano Mosca stressed the dichotomy between ruling elites and ruled masses to supplant the concept of socioeconomic classes. Robert Michels formulated the ‘iron law of oligarchy’ to warn that popular organizations, such as the Social Democratic Parties, would bring in not the era of democratic socialism but the autocracy of bureaucratic socialists.’ And Max Weber, of course, devoted much of his career to showing that the dynamics of class conflict should be studied concomitantly with the heavy weights of conservative ideologies, traditional religions, ethnic castes, and bureaucratic institutions.
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