Alipour, Mohammad Javad. “Liberating Ayatollahs and Tyrannical Priests”, Boston College, 2022. http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:109563.
Abstract
This dissertation seeks to explain why the two Western political thinkers best known for their thoughts on power came to have an utterly opposite understanding of political religion. In his writings on the Islamic revolution of 1979, Michel Foucault welcomed the leadership of the Iranian ayatollahs in the popular struggle against Western powers. In contrast, Hobbes accused religious authorities of promulgating superstitious doctrines which ultimately benefitted them while engulfing the society in civil wars. This dissertation argues that the two thinkers' contrasting assessments of political religion reflects their deepest theoretical commitments, which prove to be illustrative of modern rationalism, and its subsequent deconstruction by post-modernism.
