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Iran's Islamic Revolution in Comparative Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Said Amir Arjomand
Affiliation:
State University of New York at Stony Brook
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Abstract

The Islamic Revolution in Iran is analyzed as the latest of the “great revolutions” in a comparative perspective ranging from the early modern European revolutions to fascism. The analysis highlights the neglected importance of reactive elements, communal solidarities, and tradition in a wide variety of revolutions and revolutionary movements. Comparative inferences bring out the serious deficiency of the Marxian theory of revolution as well as of those structural theories of revolution that focus exclusively on the state. By contrast, these inferences underline the significance of ideology, religion, and culture. Finally it is argued that the emergence of a distinct Islamic revolutionary ideology can only be understood as a part of the process of crystallization of the revolutionary ideology in Western Europe and its spread to the rest of the world.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1986

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References

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Mexican fascism, the Sinarquism of the late 1930s and early 1940s, also fits Linz's pattern. The movement declined when its middle-class supporters defected to the Catholic Accion National. See Hennessy (fn. 41), 280–82. Linz's account of cases in which fascism was not anticlerical but intensely Christian is unsatisfactory, however; see Linz (fn. 45), 16, and Linz (fn. 57), 164, 184, n. 51. The reverse side of Linz's argument is well put by Merkl: “There is ample evidence that religious decline and confrontations played a role in fascist development …, creating a massive reservoir of confused quasi-religious fears and longings open to exploitation by fascist demagogues.” Merkl (fn. 45), 757.

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