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COMMENT ON CYRUS SCHAYEGH, “‘SEEING LIKE A STATE’: AN ESSAY ON THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF MODERN IRAN” (IJMES 42 [2010]: 37–61)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 July 2010

Nikki R. Keddie
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Extract

Cyrus Schayegh's “‘Seeing Like a State’: An Essay on the Historiography of Modern Iran” tries to show how historians of the Pahlavi era “have been gripped by the image of an omnipotent, completely autonomous state and how, each one . . . turned this image into what I call methodological statism” (p. 38). He discusses critically several works by historians and political scientists while mentioning more favorably a few works by anthropologists and sociologists and then indicates what he considers a better approach to Pahlavi history. Although I agree with some of his criticisms and am glad to see a serious discussion of historiography, I think he overstates the sins of historians and fails to distinguish between historians and political scientists, whose discipline leads them to emphasize the state.

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Notes and Comments
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International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 42 , Issue 3 , August 2010 , pp. 540 - 543
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

NOTES

1 Atabaki, Touraj, “Agency and Subjectivity in Iranian National Historiography,” in Iran in the Twentieth Century: Historiography and Political Culture, ed. Atabaki, Touraj (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), 72Google Scholar.

2 Many of these books are by authors I know nothing about, but even respectable PhDs such as William R. Polk have contributed to the flood. His book, modestly titled Understanding Iran: Everything You Need to Know, from Persia to the Islamic Republic, from Cyrus to Ahmadinejad (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), advocates sensible U.S. policies but has many errors, including in Persian terminology, for example, in claiming the term for modern intellectuals is uqqal (p. 109 and elsewhere).

3 Keddie, Nikki R., “Introduction,” in Modern Iran: The Dialectics of Continuity and Change, ed. Keddie, Nikki R. and Bonine, Michael (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1981), 1Google Scholar.

4 General works include Gheissari, Ali, Iranian Intellectuals in the 20th Century (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Borujerdi, Mehrzad, Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Nabavi, Negin, ed., Intellectual Trends in Twentieth-Century Iran (Miami, Fla.: University of Florida Press, 2003)Google Scholar; and Jahanbakhsh, Forough, Islam, Democracy and Religious Modernism in Iran (1953–2000): From Bazargan to Soroush (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2001)Google Scholar, excluding works on individual thinkers.

5 Olivier Bast, “Disintegrating the ‘Discourse of Disintegration,’” in Iran in the Twentieth Century, ed. Touraj Atabaki, 55–68.

6 Afary, Janet, Sexual Politics in Modern Iran (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.