JOURNAL OF CRITICAL LITERATURE AND HUMANITIES
Year:2018 | Volume:18 | Issue:6 |Papers Count:18

Frequency and continuity of military interventions in politics in different societies have led to the fact that the analysis of the interrelationships of the armed forces and the government has become one of the most important issues in political sociology studies. Military interference in politics in different forms and levels is a general phenomenon that exists in almost all countries of the world. This phenomenon in its most gentle and most extensive levels is seen in the forms of exerting influence over politicians and on the process of political decision-making and policy-making, and at the highest levels, it occurs in the form of overt political interference and resort to military coups and obvious presence at the head of political power. This article reviews the book "The Military and Politics", as one of the newest works presented in Persian, in the field of mutual relations and interactions of the military institution and the government, and it tries to review the book using a critical analysis, and considering various aspects of this topic.

Historically, after the movement of constitutionalism (Mashrouteh), secularism got engaged with Iran, but it was notattended as a problematic concern for the Iranian intellectuals. When Islamic Republic of Iran was established, everything changed and it turned into the focal point. So, many questions regarding theocracy, secularism, humanism, happiness of mankind, and political Islam started to occupy the minds of many individuals. Of these concerns, some intellectuals tried to conceptualize Islamic Secularism. " Mansour Mirahmadi wrote "Islamic Secularism: A Critique on Muslim Intellectuals" trying to show incapability and incompleteness of their design and its inconsistency with logic of Islam theories and practices. Reviewing the book structurally and qualitatively, we mentioned its formal and conceptual problems.

Post-American world book written by Fareed Zakaria focus on dimensions of political and economics of world events. Author numbered emergence of china, India and Brazil economic powers as signs of evolutions in international structure that close the sphere for America. These powers by use of internal sources in interaction to outer space indeed capture economic power want political advantage and have not intention to refuse to their pieces of world power cake. Zakaria named this phenomenal the rise of others. America at the post-cold war period has been relative decline in front of other strategic rivals and Zakaria s solutions for improve American relative conditions at post– American world are tends American to multilateralism and accepts the structural constrain that are face to that.

The purpose of this article is to review the book of justice theory by John Rawls, a contemporary political philosopher. An attempt will be made to introduce a critical review on the agenda. What is Rawls's main issue? What is the purpose of this work and its place in the resources available in this area? These are the most important issues the authors are trying to address. But, Rawls's main claim, which is justice as fairness, has been critically criticized by some schools of thought and thinkers in contemporary political philosophy. These critiques include critiques of libertarians, communitarians, and contemporary feminists. Also, the explanation of the relationship between Islamic attitude and Rawls’ Justice Theory is a subject that has been raised at the end of the article.

The Social Backgrounds of Iran’ s Revolution, written by Dr. Bashiriyeh and translated by Ali Ardestani, was published by Negahe Moaaser in 1393. The author applied different theories and concepts generally with Marxist orientation to examine the causes, processes, and consequences of Iran’ s revolution. The reduction of political struggle to class struggle and linking ideologies to classes and objective interests is the interesting but controversial feature of this book. This paper reviews the book in terms of method, theory, and historical data, and it finally concludes that despite applying various methods and extensive use of data and documentation, detailed explanations of the Islamic Revolution, the emergence of political Islam, and also the nature of the state in the Islamic Republic of Iran have not been offered. This article searches the causes of this failure in the author’ s interest and inclination to the Marxist theories and uncritical application of modern concepts and theories in the Iranian society.

The main hypothesis of Amartya Sen in his famous book "Development as Freedom" is that the private freedom should be recognized for overcoming the problem of development. According to Sen's liberal approach, the freedom is both the tool and the end of development. Essentially development is the process of extending the actual freedoms such as increasing longevity and life expectancy and in fact the increasing of the quality of life. Several criticisms have been leveled against this approach, for example the inconsistency between the essential characters of Sen's approach to development such as the instrumental rationality and freedom. Also, the Sen's claims that there are positive relationship between democracy and development, and the negative relationship between population and development are doubtful and has been criticized. Since the Sen's approach has no predetermined and essential deontological requirement except freedom itself, itis inconsistent with the deontological systems such as religion. Finally, the historical and structural relationship between individual and nations have not been seriously taken into account.

This paper is intended to review an academic book through a critical-analytical approach. The book, “ Intellectuals of Iran: Despair and Hope Narrations” , is a sociological one written as a textbook for students of different fields of social and political sciences in Iran and in the world along the course of the development of the intellectual movement in contemporary Iran. Accordingly, the writer has tried to criticize and evaluate different aspects of the book such as its form, method, and theoretical and scientific contents to find out whether it is worthy of being regarded as a source of political sociology of Iran or as a general source for interested people. This will also pinpoint its value for academic addressees. The book is generally a valuable one containing positive features. Nevertheless, there are formal and methodological deficiencies, as well as some theoretical and scientific inadequacies which will hopefully be resolved in further editions and will provide a suitable text for the students.

This article reviews the book "Language, Discourse and Foreign Policy" by Mr. Majid Adibzadeh, considering that the author's approach is cultural and discursive, and genealogical. The foreign policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran is based on anti-discourse discourses from the 1330s onwards. The purpose of this paper is to assess the cultural views and attitudes toward foreign policy in general, and the view of the author of this book is in particular. The basic question of this article is whether culturally-oriented attitude theoretically can explain politics in Iran in general and foreign policy of Iran in particular. The hypothesis of this article is that the cultural-oriented approach is reductive; instead of focusing on the role of power and structure, it focuses on the culture as a cause while that is an dependent variable. For this reason, the critical review of the cultural-oriented attitude to foreign policy and critique of the writer's view of the foreign policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran is the main focus of this article.

Modern political sphere in Islamic societies is based on a large body of fundamental issues such as freedom, democracy, and rule of law, all being ignored in the old political texts of Muslims. Hence, the dynamics of political jurisprudence in the complex society of today requires its systematic and serious introduction in explaining new issues and modern problems in the context of society and politics. Nonetheless, a high volume of the works in the field of political jurisprudence are still focused on classical definitions of politics and power, precisely, the government and the features and roles of its ruler. Few works can be found on the examination of fiqh teachings (jurisprudence) with a focus on the role of people. Mohsen Tabatabaifar's book "Fiqh Aspects of the Role of People in the Government" is evaluated as an effort to fill this gap. The author discusses the role of the people in the government from two aspects, namely traditional and modernist approaches. Considering the significance of such works, their evaluation and review would be even more critical. In terms of the analysis of the subject, enjoying outstanding points, the book has some weaknesses which are addressed through the review of its form and content.

Demand for security is the second most essential human need after the physiological necessities to the life which evolves along with the metamorphoses in common life trends and processes and has gotten different aspects. In the modern age, the plaint concept-or an afloat signifier from a postmodernist perspective-of security in the epistemological context created from the classic discourse of national security was related to a signified which was neither inclusive to all the members nor exclusive to the aliens. The mentioned shortage has been fixed through the new articulation of concepts and creation of a new conceptual correlation between the security and justice under a new epistemology embedded in the societal security discourse. In fact, the concept of national security could serve the sustainable security so long as it succeeds to create and insure justice in all societal fields along with boosting the social capital by which the convenience of individuals and social groups is reachable. To do so, adopting a society-based approach instead of a power-based one is necessary. This main is feasible and reachable only by prioritizing the civil society, empowering the society-founded institutions and embedding the policy making in the social and cultural values.

The present paper aims to analyze the dialogue between Raymond Aron and Michal Foucault. A description of the two thinkers’ views was presented in order to understand the context in which the dialogue was taking place. The main issue between the two figures centers on the continuity or lack of continuity in historical periods. Aron criticizes Foucault’ s account of epistemic breaks and defends interactions and partial continuities between historical periods. Although the two philosophers have structuralistic tendencies, their different ontology has divided them into this issue. Foucault in his archeology method does not seek continuity between events and periods, but seeks to show the disruptions that have been neglected. Aron criticizes the separation of epistemes and defends interaction between them. According to Aron, the world enjoys relatively fixed structures, which reveal themselves in different historic periods. Based on this view, he criticizes the subjective and relativistic views of Nietzsche and Weber.

In his book “ The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad” , Fareed Zakaria believes that in order to maintain the ideal of freedom and advance it in the future, we must move towards less democracy and more liberalism. He emphasizes that the critique of "a lot of democracy" does not mean trying to restore the old order, but while preserving the tradition of democracy in our countries, we should seek the revival of liberal democracy, as it is suitable for the 21st century. The most important point of this book can be the emphasis on the reliable historical data and the basis of analyses on concrete contexts. The main weaknesses are the author's involvement in trapping a kind of time-consuming mistake to prove his hypothesis. Zakaria's views on this book-and of course, his other works-although not entirely acceptable-and subject to numerous criticisms-can be considered as a succinct and relatively consistent report of the emergence and expansion of liberal democracy by looking at its future status.

This paper is a review of Javad Tabatabee's book titled A Consideration of the Translation of Modern Political Thought' Texts: A Case Study of Machiavell's Prince. In this book, Tabatabaee argues that two main factors of unreliable translation in the field of political philosophy are translator's artistic playing with words and his lack of knowledge about current and important interpretations of major works of political philosophy. In this paper, we argue that Tabatabaee's claims are for the most part plausible. Nevertheless, it seems that Tabatabaee ignores another important factor responsible for unreliable translations, i. e., translator's alteration of literal translation of philosopher's text by virtue of his assurance that he has a sufficient understanding of philosopher's meaning. Therefore, we try to argue that even if we observe two main conditions of good translation mentioned by Tabatabaee, this will not necessarily lead to a reliable translation. Thus, in addition to Tabatabaee's two main conditions, the translator also must observe the literal approach in translating philosophical texts.

Quentin Skinner and a group of writers and professors of so called Cambridge School have had an undeniable role in critical rereading of history of European thought and reprinting some of the classical texts of modern political thought. Skinner, in his enormous hermeneutical studies, linking the contextualist approach to the intentionalist view, shows that the established values of today’ s life style and our thinking about the values reflect a set of selections that we have made through the different historical times and possibilities. The contentious history of modern concept of liberty is such a case. Skinner puts the theory of civic liberty against the liberalism believing that the ideological triumph of liberalism in nineteenth degraded the republican cause of liberty. The republican tradition is one of the Skinner’ s fields of archeological rediscovery, and surveying the trajectory of Roman political thought and analyzing historical roots of neo-Roman theory of Liberty are a part of the project of rediscovering the English republican tradition. Then, in a reductionary historicism, Skinner’ s archeological hermeneutic is an English one, and his research program focused on the modern British history of liberty. His conservative archeology could not go beyond a mere historiography of thought and it is difficult to find in his project a critical position and also a philosophical examination in the field of politics. Skinner is a conservative Foucauldian.

Deliberation on thought and acts of ISIS has an strategic importance. Sources about ISIS are divided into two categories: Narrative sources and deliberative works. ISIS: Eastern Violence and Critique of Fascistic Reason written by Bachtyiar Ali (Tehran: Markaz Publisher, 2015), is a theoretical and philosophical research about entity and origins of ISIS. According to Bachtyar Ali’ s analysis, ISIS is the result of capitalism in the east. According to his belief, ISIS are like AL– Qaeda and Baasist groups and we cannot find any important difference between them since ISIS did what AL– Qaeda and Baasist groups have done and other potential groups will do. He relates these intimidating deeds and baseless claims to eternal identity, and believes that eastern wisdom is the source of all these violent acts. He does not explain the nature and mechanism of this innovative concept, but he interprets ISIS with a focus on identity and lunatic patriotism. This article pays attention to Bakhtiar Ali’ s opinions about the aforementioned concepts and reviews his work based on the methodological and theoretical perspectives such as method critique, content critique, and structure critique.

The book of Ethics, Law, and Politics includes the translation of the essays by famous German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. The various sections of the book encompass concrete issues that Schopenhauer has, like any other philosopher, expounded on the basis of his ontological and epistemological foundations. In this paper, we try to survey his ontological, epistemological, and methodological foundations, as well as the relation between the conditions and the context of his personal and social life with his thoughts, to understand his most important concerns. Also, while referring to the structure of this book in terms of its form and content, the relation of our current world to the Schopenhauer's thoughts and reflections is analyzed briefly. An important issue in Schopenhauer's political and social ideas is the role of blind and aimless will as the ontological basis of his views, which has led to a bitter insight toward man and political life. However, he places great emphasis on human life, especially on ethics as a relationship between human beings and the art. So, despite his pessimistic and tragic point of view, he is trying to provide a clear vision of life.

Psychological and political theories are the mission of understanding individual and collective behaviors in the context of political life. Over the past two decades, the analysis of the psychoanalytic dimensions of politics with the focus of this discussion on how to talk about the relationship between politics and psychology has attracted many scholars. Meanwhile, Jacques Lacan is one of the most prominent psychoanalysts who tried to bridge psychological and philosophical issues, anthropology and linguistics, and some implications could be found for linking psychological aspects and politics to his intellectual system. The main questions of the article include how can a political reading of Jacques Lacan's ideas be? And, what will be the analytical implications of the link between psychology and politics in Lacan's theory? The answer is that the Lacan political-psychological theory, through the discussion of the real and symbolic, knowledge and experience, the political and social, on the one hand, sets limits, and on the other hand, brings us innovative possibilities. These are areas of tension and facilities, limitations and aspirations. The main focus of this paper is to introduce, criticize, and evaluate Lacan and the political book.

Public Policy, written by Pierre Muller, is one of the first books on public policy that has been translated and published in Iran. Known as the science of a state in action and analyzing the public policies and also as an academic discipline, public policy has attracted the attention of experts in Iran since more than a decade ago, and it is now being taught in a limited number of universities. Regarding the structure of policymaking and decision-making in France, the writer of this book has attempted to make the readers familiar with the important and fundamental concepts in the field of public policy and propose an approach for the study of public policy to the interested readers and students. After providing an initial introduction to the concept of public policy, as a new discipline in Iran, the book chapters are introduced and discussed respectively. The review and critiques of the book translation are included in this article.