One of the more curious developments of the 2009 uprising popularly known as the Green Movement was the government show trial in which, among many others, Max Weber was indicted for sedition against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Other than showcasing the totalitarian paranoia of the regime, the purpose of this exercise was not immediately clear, nor was it immediately apparent that the prosecutors had a good handle on the clear and present danger of Weber's ideas. Regime anxiety extended to any thinker cited by the opposition, and the Islamic Republic was not alone in seeking to deconstruct the intellectual foundations of their rivals. The precise method was nonetheless somewhat clumsy and undoubtedly counterproductive.

Weber's crime was to have been co-opted and written into the constitution of the leading reformist organization, the Islamic Iran Participation Front (Jebhe-ye Mosharekat-e Iran-e Islami). Saeed Hajarian, the leading strategist of the reform movement, who had been rendered paraplegic in a botched assassination attempt in 2000, was a strong advocate of Weber's ideas, even if some of these had been lost in translation. For Hajarian, Weber's concept of authority, and the means by which a state might transition from traditional to modern/legal forms of it, provided an essential framework not only to understand Iran's problems, but also to suggest a political solution. Weber provided the intellectual template for reform and a means by which the Islamic Revolution, and the Islamic Republic, could fulfill its promise and deliver on the idea of “Islamic” democracy, with minimum—and this was the crucial factor—economic, and political, social upheaval. One revolution per lifetime, it was argued, was quite enough for any country.

This problem, how to achieve peaceful change toward a stable and durable democratic settlement for the welfare of the people of Iran, has been at the heart of political discussion in Iran for the better part of a century and is the central question of this comprehensive study by Misagh Parsa. Parsa, who has written widely on contemporary Iranian political development, brings a useful comparative approach to his analysis and argument. For Parsa, there are two possible routes to a democratic settlement: reform or revolution. He delivers a comprehensive deconstruction of the reform route arguing that the hardline political establishment has effectively used the various powers at its disposal (including tools of coercion) both to entrench its position and, crucially, to create a dangerous distance between itself and society at large. This polarization, which effectively reached its apogee with the crisis over the 2009 presidential election, leaves very little room for political compromise. Indeed, his conclusion, reached, one suspects, with some frustration and reluctance, is uncompromising: the only route left is that of revolutionary change. And in case the reader be left in any doubt, this conclusion is repeated at the end of almost every section of the final chapter.

Parsa ends his study by discussing the brutal suppression of the Green Movement, and one senses that the frustration that permeates the text reflects a wider lamentation at the failure of this particularly prolonged uprising to achieve any of its aims. It is a frustration with which many students of Iran, including this reviewer, have sympathy, even if we may dispute the somewhat stark options available to us. It is true, as Parsa points out, that the political elite of the Islamic Republic have shown singular ruthlessness in the defense of their interests (which they naturally consider synonymous with the wider interests of the country). By way of example, Parsa draws a very unfavorable contrast between Iranian and South Korean security forces in their handling of student protests, showing how connected Korean police and security remained with student protestors who they clearly felt were part of the broader society to which they all belonged.

No such fraternity appears to exist in Iran, where the security establishment has an obvious tendency to view its opponents as heretics who are literally beyond the pale. Parsa reminds us that no less than one Hasan Rouhani warned protesting students in 1999 that they would be punished as mohareb (fighters against God) and mofsed (corrupt on Earth), religious terms that imply the most severe retribution. Repentance might yield forgiveness but this was not some negotiation. The relationship was and is absolute, and society must yield to the power of the state and provide unconditional loyalty. These are not promising grounds for democratic development and one must wonder how the Obama administration convinced itself that a more liberal—and, by extension, democratic—Iran was around the corner.

Many Iranians, themselves traumatized by the events of 2009, will have reached similar conclusions about the ability of the regime to reform. But having experienced repression first hand, and believing that one revolution per lifetime is enough, they have concluded that “evolution” is the best option. Given the establishment's expanded notion of what constitutes “regime change” (even modest changes in behavior, attitude, and practice find themselves falling into this category), the acceptable pace of evolutionary change appears to some to approximate a geological timeline. Patience, always a virtue when dealing with Iran, has now achieved a scale few would have previously imagined as commentators have argued that only the slowest possible change (the more imperceptible the better) would be both manageable and sustainable given the regime's propensity to severe reaction.

What is perhaps most ironic about the polarization of recent years is that reformism as originally envisaged was regarded as a means by which the state could manage change in a manner that would avoid the upheaval of revolution and the deleterious cycle conceptualized by Weber of further autocracy followed by more revolution, a cycle which Weber posited might be exceptionally broken by charismatic leadership of progressive qualities. Leading Reformists such as Hajarian, consciously or unconsciously seeking to avoid such risks, seemed to draw on a Burkean philosophy to argue that the state must adapt in order to preserve itself. Recognizing that the hardline elite would always be reluctant to change, Hajarian argued for a dual strategy in which pressure from below would induce legislative change from above. But there was never any doubt that the change had to be legal and institutional in order for it to be durable. This was after all reform not revolution. In resisting and suppressing that platform, hardliners had paradoxically made the possibility of revolutionary change more likely: even tectonic shifts will occasionally yield earthquakes.