Absence of dialectical Gramsci in Iran: a critical analysis of Gramsci’s reception among Iranian intellectuals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The forced incorporation of Iran into the internationalized capitalist political economy in the late nineteenth century gave rise to multiple waves of social movements and revolutions. In this context, Antonio Gramsci has become a recurring reference in social analyses of Iran. This essay argues, however, that many Iranian engagements with Gramsci are undialectical. These reهadings often draw on post-Marxist, neo-Gramscian, and postcolonial frameworks – often without direct engagement with Gramsci’s own writings. While we acknowledge that some of these approaches are critical of dialectical reasoning itself, we argue that these undialectical readings have contributed to a dilution of the revolutionary thrust of Gramsci’s thought, potentially resulting in partial or distorted interpretations of social transformation in Iran. Through a critical survey of existing literature in both Persian and English, we examine how and why Gramsci has been received in particular ways in Iran. We contend that undialectical readings have contributed to the entrenchment of a dualistic methodology in analyzing Iranian society and revolutions. Specifically, we highlight how ahistorical, and consequently dualistic conceptions of space and linear understanding of time have constrained the analytical scope of these interpretations. Such readings may reinforce and naturalize nation-state-centric methodologies and diminish the transformative potential of Gramsci’s dialectical method.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.048 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".