Kamran Matin, Recasting Iranian Modernity: International Relations and Social Change. London and New York: Routledge, 2013.
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Kamran Matin (KM): My main motivation in writing this book came from my dissatisfaction with existing accounts of the Iranian Revolution. Previous accounts imputed an "exceptional" character to the revolution on the grounds of its religious form. The argument that the revolution was "exceptional" neutralized the contradiction between the revolution’s religious form and the secular eschatology of modernity central to the traditions of classical social theory underpinning these accounts. In my book, I reject this approach and provide a different strategy.
I approach the question of the historical specificity of the revolution with the idea that the problem of theorizing the Iranian Revolution is not due to its over-specificity. Rather, it is rooted in the fact that "general" social theories that inform the existing accounts of the revolution are based on "particular" categories derived from the European experience. In other words, I develop the argument that classical theories of revolution and modernity are Eurocentric and operationalized through static forms of comparative method that deny the causal and constitutive significance of relations and interactions between European and extra-European societies.
However, I do not go down the postcolonial/postmodernist road and reject the idea and desirability of general theory altogether. Instead, I argue that history does not repeat itself but it is still theorizable. This requires not just a critique of Eurocentrism, à la postcolonialism, but also the formulation of an alternative non-eurocentric general social theory. By drawing critically on Leon Trotsky’s idea of "uneven and combined development," the book seeks to do this.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does it address?
KM: To varying degrees, the book engages a relatively broad range of literature from historical sociology, Marxism, and international relations, to Iranian studies, nationalism studies, and history of ideas. But the basic objective of the book is to account for Iran’s specific experience of modernity and revolution as part of a non-Eurocentric general social theory. In the book, I show that this is possible if we recognize that Eurocentrism is itself a particular form of "internalism," that is, a form of concept formation and methodology that takes societies to have such degrees of internal coherence as to be self-contained wholes and therefore comparable. This basic assumption of internalist theories then enables "comparative" study of societies, which underlies the possibility of theoretical generalizations and extrapolations. Thus, internalist theories—that is, nearly all traditions of classical social theory—work from the inside out to form their concepts and categories and organize their analytical operations. As a result, they do not attach theoretical and constitutive significance to relations and interactions between and among multiple societies even though they regularly register them empirically. This is precisely what that underpins the problem of unilinear and homogenous conceptions of development and social change, the hallmarks of eurocentrism in classical social and political theory.
Echoing Justin Rosenberg, I further argue in the book that internalism is in turn rooted in an ontologically singular conception of society.[1] This explains the words "international relations" in the book’s subtitle. For my proposed solution to the problem of Eurocentrism in the book is to incorporate international relations as a distinct, causal, and constitutive social field into the ontological core of Marxist social theory. As you will see in the excerpt below, I do not use "international relations" in the historically specific and limited sense of relations between modern territorial nation-states, but in the generic sense of "the interactive coexistence of all historical forms of social coherence in mutually recognized integrities."[2] As I mentioned, my basic intellectual device for this incorporation is Trotsky’s idea of uneven and combined development. The fundamental departure point of uneven and combined development is precisely an ontologically plural conception of society, which is implied in its basic premise of "unevenness." Unevenness signifies and comprehends both numerical multiplicity and developmental differentiation of the social. Unevenness necessarily generates "combination" that signifies and comprehends the dynamic interlocking and amalgamation of societies’ internal patterns of development. Uneven and combined development therefore enables a general conception of social change as inherently and universally interactive and heterogeneous. So viewed from the uneven and combined development perspective, the Iranian Revolution does not appear as a theoretical externality, but a specific instance of development as intrinsically interactive and multilinear.
Put simply, this book’s fundamental argument against Eurocentrism is that the interactive coexistence of societies—and the plural "s" is crucial here—is constitutive of (and not just contingent to) their individual existence, and vice versa. On this basis, the book reconstructs Iranian history from the sixteenth century to the 1979 revolution. Each of the main chapters focuses on a key conjuncture or distinguishing feature of Iranian history. They first demonstrate the tension between the relevant conjuncture or feature and the sociological category through which it has traditionally been theorized, and then offer an alternative account informed by a critical deployment of uneven and combined development. In each case, I foreground empirically and articulate theoretically the tension-prone and dynamic amalgamation of "foreign" and "domestic" social, political, economic, cultural, and ideological forms, a condition that is incomprehensible in terms of Eurocentric, or more generally internalist, conceptions of social change. For Eurocentrism has an elective dis-affinity with socio-cultural hybridity and combined patterns of development more generally. Through this exercise, the book also formulates new auxiliary and intermediate concepts for the mediation and the concrete operationalization of uneven and combined development as a general abstraction.
Key conjunctures or features of Iranian history and their corresponding concepts that this book empirically interrogates and theoretically recasts are: the Safavi state (Asiatic and feudal modes of production), the Constitutional Revolution (the bourgeois revolution), Reza Shah’s rulership (Bonapartism), Mosaddeq’s oil nationalization movement (nationalism), and the political thoughts of Khomeini and Shariati (revolutionary Islam).
The book concludes by recapitulating this argument and reflecting on its implications for historical materialism, the book’s chief theoretical interlocutor.
J: Could you elaborate a bit on your empirical interrogation and theoretical recasting of these periods?
KM: As I explained above, this book seeks to recast Iranian modernity and revolution as part of a non-Eurocentric general social theory, which conceptually foregrounds the systematic and constitutive impact of international relations upon any given society’s internal processes and patterns of development. My theoretical compass for this theoretical enterprise is uneven and combined development. At the most fundamental level, uneven and combined development posits that inter-societal relations and forms are mutually constitutive. Consequently, it also holds that modern world dynamics can be neither resolved back into capital relations alone, nor can they be adequately explained and understood at the level of any single society. From this theoretical vantage point, I seek to show the inadequacy of the Eurocentric theoretical basis on which the extant approaches to Iranian political history, particularly those inspired by Marxism, largely rest.
In order to set the longue durée context of Iranian modernity, I begin the substantive argument of the book with an investigation of the sources of centralized and absolutist forms of the state in Iran before its systematic encounter with capitalist Europe. I do this in the context of a critical confrontation with the descriptive and yet influential idea in the field of Iranian studies that the persistence of an internally generated arbitrary state is the key to understanding Iranian history over the longue durée. I challenge this idea through an interrogation of the concepts of feudalism and the Asiatic state, which have informed the dominant, theoretically informed accounts of pre-capitalist Iran. I argue that the centralized and absolutist character of pre-modern Iranian states can be better understood in terms of the impact of the nomadic "whip of external necessity" on Iran’s sedentary society, which generated an amalgamated nomadic-sedentary state-form irreducible to Iran’s internal social structures.[3] This is substantiated through an empirical analysis of the Safavi state (1501–1722), whose last round of reproduction was subverted by the advent of modernizing European powers resulting in the eventual consolidation of the semi-feudal and politically weak Qajar state (1798–1925).
I then theoretically recast Qajar Iran—and the Constitutional Revolution that practically ended it—through a critique of the concept of "bourgeois revolution" that has informed most Marxist accounts of the revolution. I show that the concept of bourgeois revolution itself is internally incoherent and suffers from the conflation of the "development" and "expansion" of capitalism. I argue that English capitalism’s "whip of external necessity," lashed through geopolitical and geo-economic pressures, led to a historical reshuffling whereby the sequence of economic and political transformations in England’s experience of capitalist transformation was either combined or reversed in the subsequent cases of capitalist development both in Europe and beyond. This reversal is manifest in the dynamic exploitation of what Trotsky called the "privilege of backwardness," whereby non-capitalist societies confronting the pressures and encroachments of modern or modernizing European countries can import modern forms and products from the latter without going through the long historical processes of social transformation through which they were produced in the host societies. This appropriation has always a selective nature that results from the paradoxical dynamics generated by the strategic attempt made by the state classes of non-capitalist societies at shoring up their endangered rule and political independence through implanting capitalist economic technology and administrative organizations in their non-capitalist societies. This circumstance leads to socio-political contradictions that can explode into what I conceptualize as "the revolution of backwardness," of which the Constitutional Revolution is then shown to be an instance. Directly generated by Iran’s interactive coexistence with modern European countries, the Constitutional Revolution superimposed the political institutions of capitalist-based liberal democracy on a substantively non-capitalist socio-economic structure. This peculiar amalgamation was the first acute expression of Iran’s experience of modern uneven and combined development and shaped the broad contours of Iran’s subsequent experience of modernity.
This argument is followed by a critical investigation of Reza Shah’s defensive modernization and Mohammad Mosaddeq’s oil nationalization movement. I try to show that existing accounts of these episodes are inadequate due to their uncritical deployment of the theories of "Bonapartism" and "nationalism," whose internalist constitutions fail to capture the international causes and contexts of these episodes. Then I deploy internationally augmented versions of these theories to provide an alternative account. I show that Reza Shah’s rise to power reinforced the reversal of the economic and political moments of modern transformation involved in the Constitutional Revolution by superimposing a bureaucratic-centralized nation-state on a non-national, fragmented, largely semi-feudalistic society. This asymmetric amalgam was internally based on class-compromise with the landed aristocracy and ideologically charged with elite nationalism. I argue that it was this unstable combined formation, directly shaped by Iran’s international relations, that Mosaddeq’s oil-nationalization movement unsuccessfully strove to transform into a sovereign nation-state capable of overcoming Iran’s economic underdevelopment and successfully competing against the appeal of communism.
I then move on to the second Pahlavi period and challenge existing explanations of the collapse of the Pahlavi state in terms of the concepts of "the rentier state" and "uneven development." I argue that the structural fragility of the Pahlavi state ought to be understood in terms of the contradictory nature of the asymmetric amalgamations that the Shah’s externally-induced White Revolution had generated. I show that unlike the German and Russian states, which were forced to rely heavily on the intensification of internal wealth extraction in order to finance their geopolitically-induced industrialization projects, the late Pahlavi state had gained access to massive external oil revenues and strong foreign support. These circumstances obviated the use of intensified internal political accumulation in the service of industrialization. This meant that Iran’s "traditional" contender classes were politically pacified but economically bypassed and hence able to mount renewed challenges to the state. However, the success of these challenges was due to a deeper contradiction in Iran’s combined development under the late Pahlavi state: the oil-anointed subordination of the abstract individuals of the state-led capitalist development to an anachronistic absolutist state increasingly bereft of an integrative national ideology. The Shah’s modernization therefore gave rise to a novel phenomenon that I call the "citizen-subject," a hybrid agency that combined sociological features of modern citizenship with the political elements of premodern subjecthood, which were marked by Islamic cultural sensibilities. Consequently, the citizen-subject was politically liminal and particularly susceptible to the ideological appeal of "revolutionary Islam."
In the last substantive chapter of the book, I show that the ability of the Islamists to impose discursive, and later political, hegemony over the Iranian Revolution was ultimately rooted in the international, hence combined, character of the emerging ideology of "revolutionary Islam." Revolutionary Islam enabled the radicalized Islamists to make a more immediate and intimate appeal to Iran’s citizen-subjects. I substantiate this argument through a critical investigation of the political thought of Ali Shariati and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who used the highly effective strategy of "retaining the form, changing the content" to modernize and radicalize pre-existing conservative Shi’a Islam into "revolutionary Islam" through combining Western concepts and modern concerns with Islamic ideas and practice without eroding the latter’s familiarity to the masses. They therefore created an elective affinity between revolutionary Islam and the insurrectionary agency of the citizen-subject.
I conclude by making the tentative argument that in order for Marxism to fundamentally overcome the problem of Eurocentrism, it ought to incorporate international relations into the ontological core of historical materialism through modifying the latter’s premise of the "double relationship" into the "triple relationship."
J: How does this work connect to and/or depart from existing research on the topic?
KM: This book is a reaction to the exceptionalist and Eurocentric accounts of the Iranian revolution but, of course, this book is not the first attempt to tackle exceptionalism and Eurocentrism. In fact, by the 1990s, explicitly exceptionalist accounts of political Islam—and by implication the Iranian Revolution—had lost much of their initial influence to a growing body of literature that was informed by comparative sociology and politics, and more recently, postcolonial critique. A hallmark of the former literature is the "fundamentalism project" of the 1990s, which re-theorized political Islam as an instance of the wider phenomenon of "fundamentalism" as militant religious movements organized in reaction to modernization.
De-exceptionalization of political Islam through a conceptual emphasis on its causal relation with modernization as a global phenomenon was a positive step. However, it was marked by three basic problems. First, the project’s de-exceptionalization of political Islam involves the normalization of the opposition or inhospitableness of all forms of religious politics to modernization. This involved an implicit or explicit essentialization of religion that obfuscated its socio-historically constructed character. Second, and more importantly, the disruptive impacts of modernization, the main stimulant of "fundamentalisms," are often derived from the uneven development of capitalism, which itself remains unexplained. And third, and equally importantly, the novel and hybrid character of fundamentalisms is acknowledged but not seen as a provocation to the concept of modernity, which remains firmly monolithic and Eurocentric. This ultimately renders fundamentalisms, and hence political Islam, as simultaneously a deviation from, and yet also a contingent feature of, modernity.
Postcolonial critique, on the other hand, has sought to systematically re-conceptualize non-western experiences of modernity and revolution in terms of imperial and colonial relations of exploitation and subjugation. In particular, it has elucidated the ways in which race, gender, and cultural difference constitute mainstream social sciences and area studies’ blind-spots. But this self-restrictive preoccupation with discursive closures, silences, and exclusions of the non-Western "other" has meant that the postcolonial project has not included the formulation of a positive alternative to the theoretical grammar that generates these Eurocentric discursive practices.
This book’s position vis-à-vis postcolonial approaches to non-western modernities, including Iranian modernity, is informed by an argument I have developed in a separate article, which posits that there is a fundamental tension between theory and method in post-colonialism that prevents the translation of its critique of Eurocentrism into an alternative non-ethnocentric social theory.[4] For on the one hand, postcolonialism declares macro-theoretical agnosticism toward the social in general, which is manifest in its categorical rejection of, or deep scepticism toward, the concept of the universal identified with Eurocentric anticipation and violent pursuit of global socio-cultural homogeneity. On the other hand, postcolonialism comprehends colonial societies in terms of their interactive constitution through a method whose strategic site of operation is specifically the intersocietal or the international. But the idea of the international logically requires a general conception of the social whose historical referent bursts the empirical bounds of any notion of the social in the singular, whether society, culture, or civilization. This is for the simple reason that the idea of the international encompasses, or rather ought to encompass, the interconnected multiplicity of the social as an ontological property. This mutually constitutive relation between the social and the international escapes any theory that is strategically anchored in only one of these two dimensions of social reality. The apparent theoretical incommensurability of classical international relations and social and political theories is a testimony to this claim. A unified theoretical comprehension of the social and the international must, therefore, be central to any attempt at supplanting Eurocentrism. This requires an explicit theoretical incorporation of the universal—but a conception of the universal that is fundamentally rethought away from being an immanent self-transcendence of the particular, and re-comprehended as a radical amenability to, and constitutive of, alterity. It is the explanatory and theoretical potential of this approach that I have sought to demonstrate and operationalize in this book in the empirical context of Iran.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
KM: I conceived the book as an intervention in the fields of Marxism, uneven and combined development, historical sociology, international relations, and, obviously, Iranian studies. I hope that students and scholars working in each of these broad fields find something useful in it. The concepts of "amalgamated state-formations" and the "citizen-subject," and the interrogations of the "rentier state" and "revolutionary Islam," will hopefully be of particular interest to those interested in Middle Eastern studies and political Islam.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
KM: I am hoping to start a new project provisionally entitled “The Eastern Question Reloaded: The Kurds and the Remaking of the Middle East.” The project will investigate the origins, course, and the implications of each of the likely forms of the resolution of the Kurdish national question in Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Iraq. In Iraq and Syria there are already Kurdish autonomous regions and authorities that seem to be set on the path of formal independence, while in Turkey and Iran "democratic autonomy," "federalist," and "right of self-determination" solutions are on the agenda. The rise of independent Kurdish states or other forms of self-governing structures will have profound implications for the geopolitics and political economy of the Middle East, the Western Eurasian region, and the world order as a whole, comparable to the consequences of the original solution of the Eastern Question following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
J: How might the focus of this book affect and change the perspective of English-language readers regarding the contemporary political context in Iran?
KM: I think, or at least hope, that the English language readers of the book might find it useful in showing the ways in which the current conjuncture in Iranian history, the 2009 protest movement known as the "Green Movement" in particular, is related to the historical specificities of the causes, course, and consequences of the 1979 revolution. I also hope that they gain a better understanding and theoretical appreciation of the impact of the West on Iran, which, this book argues, is not limited to an explicit record of Iran’s foreign relations, the main focus of the conventional accounts. Rather, Iran’s international relations have reached more deeply into, and are organic components of, its experience of modernity and revolution.
Excerpts from Recasting Iranian Modernity: International Relations and Social Change
Iranian modernity is abidingly marked by its 1979 revolution. And that revolution has retained an aura of mystery. Taking a religious form and producing a theocentric state, yet occurring in a socio-economically modern country, the Iranian Revolution defied the secularization assumption of all classical theories of modernity. Moreover, the revolution occurred at the zenith of the Pahlavi state’s power, displayed an overwhelmingly urban character, and refracted and recalibrated the modernizing social processes from which it had originated. These features likewise challenged the main theories of revolution. The Iranian Revolution has therefore presented a theoretical riddle that has baffled scholars and politicians alike. This can be seen in the use of epithets such as "unthinkable," "enigma," "puzzle," "paradox," or "at war with history" to describe modern Iran and the Iranian Revolution.
[...]
A tendency towards essentialism is…built into existing accounts of the Iranian Revolution, for they in effect depart from a circular argument: the revolution is exceptional because it does not fit existing general theories, and general theories cannot accommodate the revolution because it is exceptional. This circular position ipso facto omits the option of constructing alternative general theories or modifying existing ones. This omission would be justifiable were the Iranian Revolution the only case of modern transformation that classical theories of modernity and revolution failed to digest. But the reality is that many other societies’ modern history has also diverged significantly from the predicates and predictions of classical theories of modernity. The "impurity" of the English bourgeois revolution, the "pre-modern" character of the French Revolution, the "special path" of modern Germany, a socialist revolution in a backward Russia, and the conjunction of a communist state and capitalist economy in China are important examples (Anderson 1964; Comninel 1990; Fischer 1986; Gramsci 1999: 32–36; Davidson 2006, respectively). The problem is further aggravated by the fact that two of these instances, i.e. English and French revolutions, are paradigmatic referents of classical theories of modernity and modern social change.
[…]
This book argues that the difficulties involved in theorizing the Iranian Revolution are symptomatic of a wider intellectual problem in classical theories of modernity, namely the construction of their general categories by reference to a particular European experience of modernity. The shorthand for this problem is eurocentrism.
[…]
The argument of this book is that eurocentrism can be decisively supplanted through a social theory that has international relations at its intellectual core. By international relations I refer to the interactive coexistence of all historical forms of social coherence in mutually recognized integrities. The incorporation of international relations into social theory involves the adoption of a plural ontology that posits relationships and processes between and within societies as mutually constitutive, and development as intrinsically interactive and multilinear. The book argues that such an ontology underpins Leon Trotsky`s theory of uneven and combined development (Matin 2007, 2012, 2013; Rosenberg 2006, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2013), which it critically deploys to de-exceptionalize Iran`s experience of modernity and revolution as specific but organic product of an intrinsic international property of the historical process.
[…]
I conceptualize the social consequence of the transformation of Pahlavi Iran into a modern rentier state in terms of a novel hybrid agency that I call the citizen-subject.…The concept of the citizen-subject is inspired by Mahmood Mamdani’s masterpiece Citizen and Subject (1996) in which he argues that all colonial situations are marked by "the division between the citizen and the subject, the normative and the native" (Mamdani 1996: 48). I argue that in a post-colonial rentier state such as late Pahlavi Iran, this empirical, formal divide is bridged and the two subject forms, which broadly correspond to capitalist and precapitalist subjectivities, are sociologically combined and generate a different kind of contradiction.
[…]
In one of his broadest outlines of human history, Marx identifies three great forms of society: the first form is based on "relationships of personal dependence" (precapitalist) followed by the second form that rests on "personal independence based upon dependence mediated by things" (capitalist), which in turn creates the conditions for the third form, a new (communist) society of "free individuality, based on the universal development of the individuals and the subordination of their communal social productivity" (cited in Sayer 1991: 13–14). As can be seen from the discussion in Chapter One, the dominant motif of Marx’s approach was the view that the first form of society would ultimately dissolve and transform into the latter form through the largely internal dynamics of individual societies. He did not consider the process and possible outcomes of the co-existence and encounter of the first and second social forms as geopolitical entities. Where he did, e.g. in his journalistic writings on "British Rule in India," he seemed to suggest that such encounters only hastened this aforementioned process of linear transformation (Marx 1973).
But as I have tried to show with reference to the late Pahlavi state in Iran, this transformation is intrinsically uneven and combined. It always involves refraction, mutation, and synthesis of the anterior and modern forms. And this interactive property of modern social transformation subverts the replication of the original capitalist social forms as they first appeared in Western Europe, England specifically. Self-modernizing under international duress, which was unique in quality and scale, and utilizing means and opportunities that international relations offered (e.g. oil-rents, modern Western administrative, military, and industrial methods and technology etc.) the Iranian state first and foremost pursued its own survival and reproduction. To be sure, it did indeed eventually dissolve the age-old relationships of personal dependency. But precisely it, the state, carried this dissolution out rather than this being the result of the immanent contradictions of these social reproductive relations and forms themselves. That the state could do so was due to a specific international conjuncture: the Cold War and the emergence of oil as a strategic commodity.
Thus, Iran’s older form of political domination of tribal and later semifeudal absolutist states came to assume a most intensive, extensive, and arguably novel form in the Shah’s attempt to reproduce and shore-up an absolutist-populist state, precisely because as a combined form of society Iran now coexisted with the most concrete and developed forms of political domination at an international level. In short, Iran’s modern uneven and combined development gave rise to a social form that was marked by personal independence based upon dependence mediated by the state. The Shah’s bureaucratic-absolutist state substituted itself for commodities. The sociological expression of this substitution was the formation of a novel social phenomenon: the citizen-subject, the emergent agency of the Iranian Revolution. This novel hybrid and the political tensions it contained and generated largely account for the structural instability of the Pahlavi state. But they do not necessarily explain the political revolution it eventually generated and even less the religious form of the revolution. These require a separate analysis of the character of the modern political ideology that in the course of the revolutionary movement established its discursive hegemony: "revolutionary Islam." This is the subject of the next chapter.
[…]
This book book’s argument [involves the recognition that] uneven and combined development’s intellectual premise of the ontological multiplicity of the social not only exerts a downward pressure on historical materialism’s intermediate concepts but also an upward pressure on its transhistorical categories. For it comes into an immediate and productive tension with historical materialism’s fundamental premise of the "double relationship," which Marx and Engels formulate in The German Ideology. There they write that "the production of life…appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as natural, on the other as a social relationship" (Marx and Engels 1970: 50). The ontologically singular conception of the social that underlies the premise of the double relationship is even more visible in its later rendition in Grundrisse where Marx asserts that "All production is appropriation of nature on the part of an individual within and through a specific form of society" (1993: 87, emphasis added). As can be readily seen, in both iterations of this basic premise of historical materialism the site of "production in general" is the individual society. This means that historical materialism’s general abstraction of "production in general" involves an implicit but highly consequential abstraction from the fact of societal multiplicity (unevenness) and hence from its consequence of the interactive development of each individual society (combination). And since uneven and combined development has a transhistorical reach it cannot be reintroduced into particular forms of production a posteriori as one of many "concrete determinations." This would involve the restriction, if not the suppression, of the causal and constitutive impact of the condition of societal multiplicity, or the international, on the concrete form of the reproduction of the society in question. Thus, to put it crudely, the logical implication of the idea of uneven and combined development, which informs this book’s argument, for historical materialism consists of the reconstruction of its premise of the "double relationship" as a triple relationship where relations among societies have a dialectical relationship with their internal social relationships and external relationship with nature. This is of course a radical revision of historical materialism that Marx himself did not carry out. But in light of the Iranian experience, not to mention the wider shape of modern world history in general, it is a revision that is surely long overdue.
NOTES
[1] Rosenberg, J. "Why Is There No International Historical Sociology?" European Journal of International Relations, 2006, 12(3): 307–40.
[2] Matin, K. Recasting Iranian Modernity: International Relations and Social Change. London and New York: Routledge, 2013, 3.
[3] Trotsky, L. The History of The Russian Revolution. London: Haymarket, 2008, 5.
[4] Matin, K. "Redeeming the Universal: Postcolonialism and the Inner-Life of Eurocentrism," European Journal of International Relations, 2013, 19(2).
[Excerpted from Recasting Iranian Modernity: International Relations and Social Change, by Kamran Matin, by permission of the author. © 2013 by Kamran Matin. For more information, or to order a copy of this book, click here.]