Introduction
The Political Thought of Daryush Shayegan (1934–2017) was formed at the intersection of philosophy, politics, religion, and culture. He was neither a politician nor a classical theorist of power, yet The Political Thought of Daryush Shayegan took shape as a philosophical reflection on the relationship between tradition, modernity, and Iranian identity. From the 1970s until the final years of his life, Shayegan went through two distinct intellectual phases, known as “the first Shayegan” and “the second Shayegan.”
In the first phase, in his book Asia versus the West (1977), he examined the confrontation between Asian civilizations and the modern Western civilization. In this work, he considered the identity crisis in non-Western societies to be the result of a rupture between ancient traditions and modern rationality. In his words, “we neither stand within our own tradition nor belong to modernity,” but rather exist in a kind of historical suspension. During this period, Shayegan breathed within an intellectual atmosphere shared with figures such as Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Seyyed Ahmad Fardid, and other critics of “Westoxication.”
However, after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, during what he himself called a “cultural shock,” his intellectual path transformed. The second Shayegan became a critic of that same identity-oriented, return-to-roots perspective, and in works such as The New Enchantment, Patchwork Identity, and Nomadic Thought (1998) and Shattered Vision (2002), he advocated cultural pluralism, dialogue among civilizations, and the critique of totalitarian ideologies.
The intellectual evolution of Shayegan from Asia versus the West to The New Enchantment can be understood as a transition from identity politics to the politics of awareness—a path in which The Political Thought of Daryush Shayegan shifts from defending tradition and authentic identity to calling for critical thinking and the acceptance of the Other.
This article seeks, by drawing on his principal works, to examine the development of The Political Thought of Daryush Shayegan in its two historical phases: from his initial engagement with the crisis of identity in the 1970s to the emergence of a pluralistic and critical approach in the final decades of his life. In both phases, politics for Shayegan is not about power, but rather about the cultural mode of being and the historical consciousness of nations.
-
The First Shayegan: Identity Politics and the Critique of the West
The Political Thought of Daryush Shayegan in the 1970s took shape within an environment in which the crisis of identity, Westoxication, and the question of cultural authenticity had become the central themes of Iranian intellectual life. In such a setting, the book Asia versus the West (1977) stands as the most significant expression of his first intellectual phase; a text which, although seemingly a philosophical and civilizational inquiry, in its deeper layers adopts a political and cultural stance regarding the relationship between East and West.
In this work, Shayegan views the West not merely as a geography, but as the embodiment of a particular form of historical consciousness. He writes:
“The West is a mode of being, a mode of being founded upon historical self-consciousness and critical reason. This mode of being has not emerged in Asia.”
In his view, Asian civilizations throughout history were formed based on sacred cosmology and spiritual systems, whereas modern West, beginning with the scientific revolution and the Renaissance, displaced the sacred from the center of the world. Thus, for Shayegan, Asia’s encounter with the West is a confrontation between two modes of consciousness: traditional consciousness and modern consciousness.
During this phase, influenced by the intellectual climate of the 1970s, including figures such as Jalal Al-e Ahmad and Seyyed Ahmad Fardid, Shayegan takes the concept of “Westoxication” seriously, yet interprets it in a more philosophical and non-ideological manner. In the same book, he writes:
“Westoxication is not merely contamination by Western products; rather, it is alienation at the level of consciousness. We are alienated because we have been severed from our own worldview without being able to situate ourselves within the new worldview.”
This statement reveals the nature of politics in The Political Thought of Daryush Shayegan during this phase: politics is not understood as competition for power, but as a struggle to reconstruct cultural identity and historical awareness. Here, Shayegan views politics within the horizon of culture and meaning, approaching a form of cultural-centered politics.
From the perspective of the first Shayegan, the crisis of politics in the non-Western world arises because these societies, lacking modern epistemological foundations, have engaged in superficial imitation of Western institutions. Critiquing this condition, he writes:
“We have entered modernity without having traversed its intellectual and psychological prerequisites. Therefore, modern institutions in our society are like a loose garment on an unfit body.”
Although this perspective carries a critical dimension, it simultaneously contains a kind of nostalgia for the “spirit of the East.” He viewed Asian civilization as still carrying a spiritual wholeness that stands in opposition to Western instrumental reason and secularism. In this regard, he writes:
“The East still lives in a living bond with the Absolute, whereas the West, having severed itself from the Absolute, has abandoned itself to its historical solitude.”
Within this framework, The Political Thought of Daryush Shayegan in its first phase understands politics in relation to meaning and civilizational spirit. For him, the political crisis in Iran and the East is essentially a crisis of meaning: the absence of a link between living tradition and conscious modernity. This view, at a time when cultural revolution and a return to religious identity were emerging, overlapped with the discourse of cultural Islamists.
Yet unlike Fardid or Al-e Ahmad, Shayegan never surrendered to an anti-Western ideology. He pursued the critique of the West within the horizon of the philosophy of culture, not as political confrontation. Nevertheless, his view in Asia versus the West still operated within the binary of East vs. West, tradition vs. modernity, and a partial defense of an “Asian spirit.”
This dualism later drove Shayegan to a critique of his own thought. The Iranian Revolution, which he considered the expression of the collective unconscious and mythical dimensions of society, became the rupture point between the first Shayegan and the second.
-
The Breaking Point: Revolution, Ideology, and the Emergence of the Second Shayegan
The transformation in The Political Thought of Daryush Shayegan cannot be explained without understanding the experience of the Iranian Revolution. For Shayegan, the Revolution was not merely a political event, but a kind of “spiritual earthquake” that shook the intellectual foundations of himself and his generation. He stated in an interview years later:
“The Revolution was a kind of cultural shock for me; I realized we are a people still living in the mythological layers of history.”
In the early years after the Revolution, Shayegan critically reflected on the nature of religious revolution, and the result of this inquiry appeared in his book What Is a Religious Revolution? (1982). In this work, he attempts to show that the Iranian Revolution was not a repetition of modern revolutions such as those of France or Russia, but the emergence of a form of religious ideology that blends myth and politics.
He writes:
“The Iranian Revolution is neither a return to religious faith nor the realization of modern ideals, but rather a revival of mythic forces in the sphere of politics—forces arising from our collective unconscious.”
Shayegan calls this phenomenon the “myth of revolution,” a myth in which religious concepts appear dressed as political ideology. In this view, the Revolution represents the crisis of transition from tradition to modernity: a society that has entered the modern historical realm but still lives psychologically and mentally in the world of myths.
During this period, The Political Thought of Daryush Shayegan elevates from cultural critique to the critique of ideology. He transitions from “identity politics” toward the “critique of myth in politics.” In his own words:
“Ideologies are myths disguised as reason; they imprison humanity in the endless repetition of myth under the promise of salvation.”
Within this framework, Shayegan concludes that the religious and anti-Western intellectual currents of the 1970s unwittingly paved the way for the ideologization of faith. He writes:
“Those who spoke of returning to the self were in fact trying to reconstruct a self that no longer existed; the result was the creation of an ideological self.”
This intellectual shift marks the beginning of the “second Shayegan,” a thinker who crosses the boundaries of East and West and seeks a new language to express consciousness in a multicultural world. If the first Shayegan was concerned with preserving identity, the second Shayegan arrives at a relativistic and critical understanding of identity.
Thus, the Revolution for Shayegan was an experience of the collapse of the binary between tradition and modernity. He writes:
“We have neither returned to the past nor stepped into the future; we live in an in-between state, in a limbo between myth and modernity.”
At this stage, he no longer speaks of “Asia versus the West,” but instead speaks of “between cultures” (entre les mondes). The Political Thought of Daryush Shayegan at this point marks a transition from defending a fixed cultural identity to recognizing the fluidity of identity and the necessity of dialogue with the Other.
In this way, Shayegan transforms from a “cultural anti-Western thinker” into a “post-structuralist and pluralist philosopher.” Yet this change is not a denial of his past but the continuation and self-reflection on the same long-standing concern: the crisis of meaning in the modern age.
-
The Second Shayegan: From Critique of Tradition to Fluid Consciousness and the Politics of Dialogue
The second Shayegan emerges from the self-reflective and critical return of Daryush Shayegan to his own intellectual foundations. If the first Shayegan sought to reconstruct an “authentic Eastern identity” in opposition to the West, the second Shayegan aims to understand the complex mechanisms of identity formation in the multicultural modern world. This transition can be traced in three of his major works: The New Enchantment (1998), Patchwork Identity and Nomadic Thought (2001), and Shattered Vision (2002).
In The New Enchantment, Shayegan shows that modernity has not eliminated enchantment from the world, but has itself become a new form of enchantment. He writes:
“The contemporary world appears disenchanted, but in fact is trapped in a new enchantment: the enchantment of technology, image, and speed. We have escaped the meaningful world of tradition, yet we are ensnared in the myth of progress and consumption.”
This “new enchantment,” according to Shayegan, is the unconscious rebirth of myth within modernity. Contrary to Enlightenment assumptions, myth has not vanished but has merely changed form. Thus, for the second Shayegan, critique of modernity does not mean returning to the past; it means becoming aware of the myths of modernity itself.
Along this path, Shayegan introduces the key concept of “patchwork identity,” a metaphor that describes the condition of contemporary humanity, particularly in non-Western societies. He writes:
“The contemporary human being does not live in a unified world but in fragments of cultures and times. He is singular, yet has multiple faces: a traditional face, a modern face, and a face still in formation.”
In this perspective, identity is no longer fixed or essential; it is a dynamic, multilayered process formed in the encounter between cultures. In this phase, the Political Thought of Daryush Shayegan moves from defending a single authentic identity to embracing cultural fluidity and relativism. This is the meaning he assigns to “nomadic thought” (pensée nomade):
“Nomadic thought is a thinking that does not remain attached to any single intellectual territory. It travels among cultures, learns from all, and settles in none.”
Politically, this shift is profound. Whereas in Asia versus the West politics was understood as a return to cultural selfhood, here politics becomes a dialogue among cultures and consciousnesses. In his later works, Shayegan refers to what may be called a “politics of dialogue”: a politics built not on domination and confrontation, but on mutual recognition and understanding of the Other.
At this juncture, parallels can be drawn between Shayegan and Western thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas or Charles Taylor. Habermas speaks of “communicative rationality” and Taylor of “the politics of recognition.” Shayegan, drawing on the civilizational experience of Iran and the East, arrives at what could be termed “the politics of understanding and coexistence.” The difference is that his foundation is not the modern social contract tradition, but the lived experience of cultural plurality.
In Shattered Vision, he writes:
“Every civilization is a mirror reflecting the image of the other. No civilization is born in a vacuum; each is the echo of a dialogue among voices, even if that dialogue is unconscious.”
In the Political Thought of Daryush Shayegan, the “Other” is no longer a threat but a condition for the continuity of consciousness. Politics is not the battlefield of identities but the arena where consciousnesses meet and unfold.
The second Shayegan does not speak of “East and West”; he speaks of cultural in-betweenness, of living in an intercultural space where no identity claims superiority over another.
Thus, his thinking culminates in a philosophical and cultural pluralism that resists all forms of ideological totalitarianism. If the first Shayegan called for a return to tradition, the second Shayegan calls for reinterpreting tradition through the lens of modern rationality. In his words:
“Tradition, if unable to reread itself, becomes a museum relic. Only by transcending itself can it live again.”
This sentence perhaps summarizes his entire intellectual journey: from loyalty to tradition to the awareness of the need to move beyond it.
-
From Identity Politics to the Politics of Awareness: Synthesizing the Transformation in The Political Thought of Daryush Shayegan
The transformation in The Political Thought of Daryush Shayegan is one of the rare cases in Iranian thought in which a thinker consciously transcends his earlier position. His path from Asia versus the West to The New Enchantment is in fact a movement from the search for identity to the search for awareness; a shift from cultural inwardness to dialogical openness.
In the first phase, influenced by critiques of modernity and philosophical traditionalism (from Guénon and Coomaraswamy to Fardid), he divided the world into two opposing realms: spiritual East and material West. Politics here meant preserving tradition against modernity. In this period, rather than being a political theorist, he was a philosopher of “civilizational spirit.” Politics thus became a kind of “ethics of fidelity to heritage.”
But the Iranian Revolution challenged this view. Shayegan realized that returning to tradition, in the contemporary historical context, could transform into cultural ideology and reproduce myth in the political sphere. From this point, he shifted from defending “authentic identity” to criticizing “ideological identity” and understood that politics without critique of consciousness inevitably reproduces myth and sanctifies power.
In the second phase, introducing concepts such as “nomadic thought” and “patchwork identity,” he came to view politics not as a battlefield of identities but as a field for mutual cultural understanding. Politics in The Political Thought of Daryush Shayegan becomes awareness of oneself and the Other. He writes:
“The Other stands not before us but within us. Every dialogue is, in truth, an inner dialogue of consciousness with its unknown aspects.”
Thus, his political philosophy rests on three principles:
- Critique of myth in politics: overcoming ideological, myth-driven politics rooted in the collective unconscious.
- Acceptance of cultural plurality and identity relativity: identity is not innate but produced in cultural interaction.
- Politics of dialogue and awareness: the only escape from the crisis of meaning in the modern world lies not in confrontation but in conscious dialogue between tradition and modernity.
These three principles summarize Shayegan’s transition from identity politics to the politics of awareness.
In this sense, The Political Thought of Daryush Shayegan does not seek to construct a theory of the state or power; rather, it strives to reconstruct the foundations of political consciousness in societies trapped between tradition and modernity. He understood that without rethinking consciousness, every political project in the non-Western world risks falling into the same cycle of myth and ideology. Shayegan writes:
“In a world where everything changes rapidly, loyalty to truth is possible only if we see truth itself in motion.”
Thus, the Political Thought of Daryush Shayegan can be seen as an invitation to live between worlds—between East and West, tradition and modernity, self and other. He is neither an advocate of returning to the past nor a proponent of surrendering to the West; rather, he seeks to show how one can live consciously and meaningfully in a fragmented world.
Final Conclusion
Ultimately, Shayegan arrives at the insight that contemporary politics in non-Western societies, if not grounded in dialogue and self-awareness, inevitably falls back into ideology. In his worldview, “thinking” itself is a political act, because only free thinking can prevent the reproduction of myth.
Thus, The Political Thought of Daryush Shayegan transcends cultural critique and becomes a philosophy for conscious, pluralistic living in the age of globalization—a philosophy in which politics does not define meaning through power but liberates meaning from the grasp of power.
References
Shayegan, D. (1977). Asia Against the West. Tehran: Amir Kabir Publications.
Shayegan, D. (1992). Le regard mutilé: Schizophrénie culturelle: pays traditionnels face à la modernité. Paris: Albin Michel.
Shayegan, D. (1997). New Enchantment: Fragmented Identity and Nomadic Thought. Tehran: Farzan Rooz.
Shayegan, D. (2001). Under the Skies of the World. Tehran: Tarh-e No.
Shayegan, D. (2002). In Search of Lost Spaces. Tehran: Tarh-e No.
Jahanbegloo, R. (2002). Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Iran: An Interview with Daryush Shayegan. Tehran: Farzan Rooz.
Katouzian, H. (2010). The Persians: Ancient, Mediaeval and Modern Iran. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Zimran, R. (2016). Introduction to the Philosophy of Culture in Contemporary Iran. Tehran: Ney Publications.
Papli Yazdi, M. H. (2019). Orientalism and Iranian Identity. Tehran: Institute for Humanities Studies.
