Conclusion

How does the archetype of collective subjectivity in Iran’s 1979 revolution illuminate contemporary debates about revolutionary politics? This concluding chapter examines a pattern of thought across three texts published in 1978 as the uprising in Iran gained momentum. The texts crystallize trends in fields of study that frame how most scholars received the 1979 revolution: the comparative historical study of revolution across the social sciences, political theories of agonism and democracy, and critiques of Orientalism in Middle East Studies. The pattern reveals a binary in assessments of unruly politics between incorporation and irreducible difference. This book’s discussion of an insurgent witness disrupts the binary. To see it, and the truth of historical events in Iran, requires a recalibration of inherited frames of analysis and hence a change in perceptions of revolutionary politics.