Psychological Reductionism in the Works of Mostafa Malekian, by Hassan Mohaddesi

Hassan Mohaddesi Gilvaei: I know Mostafa Malekian as a public teacher. A teacher in the specific sense of the word has a limited number of students and teaches them a specific subject within his area of expertise. But public teachers are those who educate a broad segment of the people across different generations, directly or indirectly, and provide the possibility of intellectual growth and sometimes even personal and spiritual transformation for diverse individuals from various generations. They more or less influence the "souls and minds" of several generations of human beings and bring about a kind of growth among a multitude of their direct and indirect audiences.

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Preamble: At the request of dear friends at the esteemed Iran-e Farda magazine, which was to dedicate pages to the critique and examination of the thoughts of Professor Mostafa Malekian, I wrote the following critique and sent it to the magazine. Due to the reduction in the magazine's volume, and in fact a lack of space, short sections of my article that expressed my affection for this esteemed and high-ranking professor were removed (at least the introduction and parts of the problem statement section were cut), and without my wanting it, my article has apparently taken on a slightly harsh tone. I believe that criticism should be frank and without flattery, yet polite. Now, the full publication of my article can demonstrate that I have adhered to this principle.

This article, under the same title, was published in issue 18 of Iran-e Farda magazine (15 Azar 1394, pp. 60-64). I thank Iran-e Farda magazine here for publishing my relatively lengthy article. I hope this piece will be of interest to esteemed readers.

Meta-Theoretical Disputations in the Social Sciences:

Psychological Reductionism in the Works of Mostafa Malekian

Hassan Mohaddesi Gilvaei*

Introduction

Out of goodwill, I have been asked to offer any words I might have in critique of Professor Mostafa Malekian and to write a note. This is the least debt I can repay to a professor from studying whose works and listening to whose talks I have both learned various points and been inspired with a motivation to learn. I will write some points to the extent that space allows and remain watchful for an opportunity for further discussion.

Statement of the Problem

I know Mostafa Malekian as a public teacher. A teacher in the specific sense of the word has a limited number of students and teaches them a specific subject within his area of expertise. But public teachers are those who educate a broad segment of the people across different generations, directly or indirectly, and provide the possibility of intellectual growth and sometimes even personal and spiritual transformation for diverse individuals from various generations. They more or less influence the "souls and minds" of several generations of human beings and bring about a kind of growth among a multitude of their direct and indirect audiences. Public teachers acquire this ability through a long, and sometimes even lifelong, endeavor, and during this long and tireless endeavor, they delve into various disciplines and fields of knowledge, drink from the fountains of different understandings, and quench their thirst from the circle of human knowledge as much as they can. Then, after a process of absorbing, digesting, and producing fragments of knowledge, they compassionately offer their intellectual products to the people of different generations in their society. More than anything else, they can be likened to a honeybee that makes invigorating nectar from the nectar of diverse, beautiful, and desirable flowers. This is the status and standing that Mostafa Malekian holds in my view. In contemporary Iran, I know of four public teachers from all of whose works I have benefited—some less, some much more—and I have praised each for possessing certain qualities. These four are: Ahmad Kasravi, Ali Shariati, Abdolkarim Soroush, and now, Mostafa Malekian.

     But aside from this affirmative description (a description in which my deep heartfelt praise and devotion are inscribed), the great distinction of public teachers is accompanied by a shortcoming and flaw just as great. The great shortcoming of public teachers is that, because the nature of their work requires their intellectual activity to span multiple fields of knowledge and multiple disciplines, they are inevitably drawn into expressing opinions in domains and on subjects in which they have no expertise, and consequently, they commit mind-boggling errors that, at first glance, seem astonishing and unbelievable to the specialists in each area of expertise. But when we understand what the role of the public teacher is, and understand that this is a requirement of the role they play, we realize that this kind of mind-boggling error in the work of a public teacher is something entirely normal and not at all surprising.

     One of the types of mind-boggling errors of Mostafa Malekian is that he reduces the social matter to the individual matter (whether psychological or moral). What he says about the social matter is, in fact, shocking even for any sociology student. I collected a set of such shocking statements by Malekian, read them to some of my colleagues, and experienced their simultaneous astonishment. What appears in the box below is a small portion of such statements in the works of Mostafa Malekian:

Table 1: A selection of statements by Mostafa Malekian from three of his published texts:

"First, there is no such thing as a social institution. These are names. Names without referents. Social institutions simply do not exist. There is no such thing as politics or economics. I say explicitly, there is no such thing as the family. There is no such thing as education. In the human world, only individuals exist. Individual human beings exist. Any other name we give them is a delusion." "Apart from 75 million individuals, there is no such thing as the Iranian nation. There is no such thing as the country of Iran or the Muslim Ummah. [...] My first point is that these abstract concepts do not exist." "The question might arise: can one live without an identity? Everyone defines themselves both to themselves and to others. Well, we also define ourselves: we are Iranian. We are Iranian Muslims. Some say modern Iranian Muslims. I say, if identity is the problem, wherever you are, say you are from planet Earth, and therefore a cosmopolitan. Your creed is truth-seeking and benevolence; your kin are all the virtuous people of the age. Whoever cares for humanity is my kin. Others are not my kin. Others are not my kin, but that does not mean I wish to destroy them. Therefore, I am a human being, a cosmopolitan. Where are you from? From planet Earth. If one day beings are found in another solar system, I will no longer say I am from planet Earth. I will say I am from the solar system. And I am kin to all the virtuous people of the age." "Ontologically, metaphysically, no convincing reason has yet been presented that something called society, something called a system, something called a nation, something called race, and other such named things exist. All of these are a series of abstract concepts fabricated by humans. [...] My argument is not that abstract concepts should not be coined; my argument is that we should not ascribe objective, external existence to our own fabrications." "When you start from within, the outside gets fixed. But if you start from the outside, the inside does not get fixed." "If you pay attention, when they say an institution has changed, it means the laws governing the relations of that institution have changed. Whether it is the institution of economics or the institution of politics; this is what we mean. When you say the institution of marriage or the institution of the family has changed in Iran, you mean the laws concerning divorce, marriage, child custody, relations between husband and wife, relations between parents and children—these are what you mean, that the laws have changed. Institutional change means a change in social arrangements. It means a change in social regulations [...] So if you want an institution to be reformed, the laws governing that institution must be reformed, and laws are written by human beings [...] because they possess egoism, because they are not yet the human beings they ought to be. Now, you can change the regime a hundred times, change the constitution and economic and political laws a hundred times, but when this human being must write the law, we have no other being to write the law. This is the correct, shared teaching of all religions and creeds: 'Indeed, Allah will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves.' If you want a desirable objective change to occur in you, a desirable subjective change must first occur. External changes are not good at all unless they are preceded by good internal changes." "If their egoism is to be eliminated, changes must occur in their beliefs, changes must occur in their feelings, emotions, and sentiments, and changes must occur in their desires. I call these three changes cultural change. A person's culture is their beliefs, their feelings, emotions, and sentiments, and their desires." "Individualism means this: take responsibility for the badness of your life, stop blaming it on this person or that. Accept that the goodness and happiness of your life is in your own hands. You will say, is there nothing outside of me that causes my misfortune? I say, the force outside that wants to harm you must first find a correspondence within you, because that force might try to influence everyone and make us wretched and miserable. But we see that three of us did not become wretched and miserable, because we created a resistant interior for ourselves. Therefore, individualism means the individual must take responsibility, must accept that I am the cause of my own misery. And they are the cause of their own happiness." "A person must consider themselves: why does a threat affect me but not my brother? Why does enticement affect me but not my brother-in-law?

‌Something certainly exists within me; otherwise, the threatener’s job is to threaten, and the enticer’s job is to entice. Why does it not affect some people? Let us not speak of institutional forces in such a way as if they create a determinism to which people are bound hand and foot; it is absolutely and utterly not so.

What appears in the box above is only a small portion of such statements by Mostafa Malekian, selected over a short period. By reviewing all of his works, a great many such statements could probably be extracted.

Meta-theory in the Social Sciences

Before explaining Mostafa Malekian's errors in these kinds of discussions, I must first pursue a theoretical discussion concerning meta-theory. Statements such as those quoted from Malekian in the box above are discussed within a specific domain of the social sciences called meta-theory.[1] Meta-theory is an external, observational discussion of a discipline's theories, in which the epistemological principles and philosophical foundations of the discipline—usually, though not necessarily, after a considerable number of theories have been produced in that discipline—are discussed and examined, and especially the theoretical paradigms within that discipline are identified, described, and analyzed through the scrutiny and examination of their most important axioms. The question of the nature of social reality, which falls under the heading of social ontology,[2] is also a meta-theoretical discussion in sociology:

"Meta-theories are primarily concerned with ontological questions, including the following: What is 'society,' in a general sense? What kinds of things exist in the social world? If things such as actors or agents exist, what kind of things are they? Are activities and society intangible ('two sides of the same coin') and thus so densely interwoven that (as doctrines concerning ontological duality claim) it is impossible to separate them from one another? [...]" (Sibeon, 2004: 13).

Ontological questions about social phenomena such as social institutions, society, the family, the nation, corruption, and social change are questions whose answers are sought and formulated within meta-theory. Meta-theoretical discussions cannot be disputed or revised by referring to theoretical and empirical sources (Ibid: 13), and issues such as Malekian's disputes concerning the ontology of social phenomena must, in principle, be discussed and resolved at the meta-theoretical level.

The Malady of Psychologism

The main problem in Malekian's discussions of this kind is that he does not see the social as possessing an existence independent of the individual (whether psychological or moral). He considers the social world to be constituted solely of two main elements: 1) individuals, 2) the relationships between individuals. Hence, in his view, nothing supra-individual exists, and all social matters have no existence beyond or independent of individuals. Such a perspective, which can be called a crude[3] or radical atomistic view, is a specific form of reductionism in the social sciences. Now, whether this crude atomism has emerged from the reductionism in question, or conversely, crude atomism has led to the reductionism in question, is another discussion. My answer, for the time being, is that in Malekian's thought, psychological reductionism has culminated in crude atomism.

     Sibeon refers to reductionism as one of the mortal sins[4] in the social sciences (Ibid: 1). The reductionism that Malekian advocates is today referred to in the global convention of the social sciences as the malady of psychologism[5] (Moscovici, 1993: 7-12). This epistemic malady speaks of the reduction of phenomena belonging to other levels of reality to psychological and individual phenomena, as a result of which other forms of knowledge, in the final analysis, require psychological explanation. The interesting point is that while someone like Moscovici laments the excessive repetition of the accusation that sociologists and social scientists level at psychological analysts, branding everyone, rightly or wrongly, with the malady of psychologism, and tries to remind them that social phenomena also have a psychological dimension and aspect that cannot be neglected, in Iran many experts from different positions and domains reduce social phenomena to psychological and individual matters, and this has gone so far that one social theorist has shown a strong reaction to this type of reductionism and has considered the growth of psychology, at least in some respects, a product of the weakening of sociology:

"With the weakening of sociology, two sciences were greatly strengthened; one is psychology and the other is philosophy. What is meant by psychology is this: this school says society has a problem, but in its view, where is the problem? The problem is in the individual, not in society. Who should attend to this individual? Psychology" (Abazari, 1394).

How is sociology weakened: when it becomes established that society does not exist, and this is something that, according to this social theorist, the neoliberals have established:

"The second rule of this school is that there is no such thing as society, and only individuals exist. This school trumpets that we love individualism. But this individualism means that you are an individual and do not have the right to negotiate your life with the government or employer, etc., in the form of a collective. You have the right to gather to go to the theater or any other recreation. There is no such thing as society, and only the individual exists. The result of these two rules is that if there is no such thing as society and economic laws are immutable, the first science to be ejected from the circle of sciences globally is sociology, and this happened globally, and now this issue is also occurring in Iran" (ibid).

Now Malekian, from another position, also says that there is no such thing as society; except a "misapplied name" and void. But regarding the malady of psychologism, it has been stated that:

"According to Wittgenstein, there is a kind of general malady of thought that always seeks (and finds) something from which all our actions originate; something that must be called a mental state, 'like a reservoir.' He gave a simple description of it. In this way, a person says 'Fashion changes because people's tastes change' ... '[Here] taste is the mental reservoir.' Notice how a collective phenomenon, fashion changes, is represented in psychological terms. The social event is referred to the mental states of the individuals participating in it, and these mental states are mentioned as the cause of the change. The emptiness of this particular example is obvious, but some explanations of this type are difficult to discover. Their common characteristic is the attempt to analyze specifically social phenomena in psychological terms. For this reason, the 'malady' that Wittgenstein pointed to is usually called 'psychologism'" (Bloor, 1983: 6 quoted in Moscovici, 1993: 9).

Malekian's Mind-Afflicting Errors in the Realm of Social Sciences

The first problem with Malekian's work (and that of other public teachers), which arises from the role he plays as a public teacher, is that he discusses and delves into a very wide range of subjects. If we look at the content in Box 1, we see that his topics range from social institutions to nation and nationalism, corruption, and human and social change, including revolution (change of political regime). It is therefore clear that he lacks expertise in many of these matters and does not have mastery or command over the specialized theories and works related to each field. For example, as someone who has participated in several research projects on corruption and social health and has written on this subject, I can say with great confidence that Malekian did not have specialized knowledge or familiarity with the topic of corruption—at the time of delivering the aforementioned remarks on corruption—and was not acquainted with the major theories or even a portion of the research conducted on corruption. For instance, he reduces corruption to the performance and desires of individuals but fails to note that a significant portion of corruption arises from systems that humans have devised; systems that were designed to achieve certain goals but in practice slow down the flow of current affairs. Hence, these systems create a breeding ground for corruption that is not, in the first instance, caused by anyone's will or volition; rather, to escape a convoluted and labyrinthine system that causes delays in getting things done, individuals may turn to corruption, perhaps unwillingly and sorrowfully, so as not to lose their limited opportunities in the social world. For example, imagine a system in which obtaining a building permit takes six months, and in a troubled economy where the price of construction materials is unstable and may rise rapidly, a six-month delay can deprive a person of the possibility of building a house. In such a system, where the workflow and the process of evaluating a permit application takes six months, many social actors, without it being their desire, resort to bribery so as not to lose the chance to build a house or to prevent losses caused by fluctuations in the price of construction materials. In such cases, where we are dealing with system-induced corruption, some sociologists and analysts have even spoken of the function of corruption and considered it beneficial. Moreover, a large part of corruption is compensatory corruption, in which individuals who are themselves initially victims of corruption, in order to compensate for the losses incurred, themselves engage in corruption to offset a portion of the damages. Here, the individual is driven toward corruption despite their own wishes, inclinations, and moral patterns, in order to survive. Here, it is fundamentally not individual desires, inclinations, and beliefs that drive one toward corruption, but social trends and processes that compel one to act contrary to their moral principles. Yet Malekian simplistically reduces such issues by invoking moral and psychological concepts like "egoism." Unfortunately, it must be said that Malekian's type of analysis and explanation in such cases resembles the seemingly wise advice of ordinary people: If we make individuals righteous, all social problems will be solved one by one. This is precisely Malekian's logic:

"So if you want an institution to be reformed, the laws governing that institution must be reformed, and laws are written by people [...] because they have egoism, because they are not yet the people they ought to be" (Malekian)

     Similarly, it can be said that he most likely lacks mastery and command over theories of revolution, the history of revolutions, and theories related to nation and nationalism, yet he has entered into these subjects, spoken about them, and confronted rival claims. For example, he has no understanding or conception of national identity. He imagines that identity is a matter of choice and selection related to individuals' desires and beliefs. Since this is so, I can choose my identity:

"I say, if identity is the problem, wherever you are, say you are a citizen of the Earth and therefore a cosmopolitan. Let your creed be truth-seeking and benevolence; your kin, all the good people of the age. Whoever cares for humanity is my kin" (Malekian).

But identity is not something that can be individually and voluntarily constructed or chosen—just like a mask one can buy at a grocery store! Identity is something that is constructed through social processes. It is not enough what an individual calls themselves, how they know themselves, or what they choose. As long as others recognize them in a different way, they will continue to suffer from an identity problem. If the matter were as Malekian claims, the crisis of identity should not exist. When someone lives in France but the French consider them Arab and the Arabs consider them French, who are they really? What difference does it make from Malekian's perspective? It is as if identity is a matter detached from a person's lived experiences in the social world and, consequently, an individual and subjective matter that can be chosen. But identity is not something that lies outside a person's lived world and beyond their lived experiences; rather, it is constructed through social processes:

"In fact, identity has been defined, objectively, as being located in a particular world, and subjectively, it can only be appropriated along with that world. In other words, all identifications take place within horizons that imply a specific social world" (Berger and Luckmann, 1375: 181).

Identity is a contextual matter, and each time, contextual variables (nationality, gender, ethnicity, skin color, religion, class, group, etc.) play a role in its social construction and creation, coloring a person's lived experiences. But Malekian decontextualizes it and makes it dependent on human choice. In this way, once again, a social matter is reduced to an individual, psychological, and moral one.

     Similarly, Malekian's thought is afflicted with a kind of naive voluntarism, according to which the human being is imagined as a free agent who can overcome and leave behind all external forces and pursue their own path:

"Therefore, individualism means that the individual must take responsibility, must accept that I am the cause of my own unhappiness. They are also the cause of their own happiness" (Malekian).

"A person must consider themselves: why does a threat affect me but not my brother? Why does enticement affect me but not my brother-in-law? There must certainly be something within me; otherwise, the threatener's job is to threaten, and the enticer's job is to entice. Why does it not affect some people? Let us not speak of institutional forces in such a way as if they create compulsion, as if people are bound hand and foot before them; it is absolutely not like that" (Malekian).

But there are various social factors involved in my fate, and depending on where I live, what possibilities I have, and how much effort I make, I play a role in constructing my own destiny. The limited resources available, the competition of others over these same limited resources, the actions of those who make decisions about me, and the agency of others that delineates my own agency, the means and tools I need to realize my will, the values I have internalized by living in a particular group—all of these are involved in constructing my fate, and all of these are social matters, not merely individual ones dependent on personal morality and will (Bauman, 1990: 20-24). Even if I have freedom of choice (which is always limited and sometimes entirely absent), as Bauman says, "freedom of choice does not by itself guarantee the freedom to effectively act upon the choice" (Ibid: 22). Even if we highlight the human being's agency in determining their fate, still, in Bauman's precise phrasing, "today's choices are to some extent constrained by yesterday's choices" and by what I have done in the past (Ibid: 23). Thus, even my prior choices limit the realm of my self-determination. In other words, yesterday's choice is today's compulsion. If I were to examine Malekian's statements one by one in this manner, I would need a seventy-volume Masnavi. Therefore, I will proceed to the final discussion.

The Social: Constructs through Intersubjectivity

What are social phenomena such as the institution, the family, education, the nation, the system, and social structure, ontologically speaking? Are they, as Malekian claims, merely “names without referents” and empty? Here too, Malekian is once again caught in a kind of reductionist view of the social, which we may call a form of conventionalism; a convention regarding the naming of phenomena. Malekian reminds his audience: beware, do not forget conventions, and do not see names as possessing being! He warns us against the fetishism of names:

“My discussion is not about whether abstract concepts should be coined; my discussion is about the fact that we should not ascribe an external, objective existence to our own fabrications” (Malekian).

But social phenomena are not conventional names; they are intersubjective matters. Malekian has neither an understanding of intersubjectivity nor any attention to the trends and processes of social construction and the products that are the constructs of intersubjectivity. The social world is the product of a shared subjective world among individuals. Although individuals make this world, once such a world is made, it goes beyond the realm of the individual and becomes a supra-individual matter that can stand up against its creators and even enslave them. The social is the product of a network of intersubjective relations. When a social matter is constructed from within these intersubjective relations, a network of intersubjective relations must also exist to destroy it. For example, when people reach an understanding about a piece of paper as money, now everyone needs this same piece of paper for economic exchange. Now one can no longer say that money is a name without a referent; rather, money is a social construct[6] without possessing which and observing its related rules, a person is driven to bankruptcy and misery. When someone signs a few sheets of paper as a marriage contract, they are socially involved in an institutional matter; as long as other people accept these few sheets of paper as a marriage contract and consider the images (signatures) we have scribbled as our signature, we can no longer violate these and claim that these were just scribbles. Here we are faced with a social institution called marriage, which has been constructed through intersubjective relations among individuals. Therefore, here we are faced with phenomena that, as Searle says, are epistemically objective and ontologically subjective:

“We can have epistemically objective knowledge about money and elections, even if the kind of facts about which one has epistemically objective knowledge are themselves entirely ontologically subjective” (Searle, 2006: 15).

As long as money is involved in intersubjective relations, it is an objective matter that operates independently of the will of this or that person; unless, in the intersubjective world, money loses its subjective validity. When, in the middle of the Hajj al-Tamattu‘ in front of the tents in Mina, a black Nigerian woman who does not even know Persian but recognizes the two-thousand-toman note as “do khomeini” and is willing to trade with me, an Iranian, by means of “do khomeini,” this paper bearing the image of Ayatollah Khomeini is a social fact that possesses a life independent of the life of individual particles (“individual human beings,” here individual Iranians), and with the help of a number of them, one can even enslave and exploit people. Thus, the social world is the joint product of human subjects which, after being constructed, acquires objectivity and is then experienced as something independent of human beings (or, as Malekian says, “individual human beings”):

"Every institutional world is experienced as an objective reality; it has a history that antedates the individual's birth and is not accessible to his memory; it existed before he was born and will exist after his death. This history itself, as the tradition of existing institutions, possesses the quality of objectivity. The individual's biography is apprehended as an episode located within the objective history of society. Institutions, as objective and historical facts, confront the individual as undeniable events. Institutions, with their stubborn reality, exist outside him—whether he likes it or not. He cannot wish them away. They resist his attempts to change or evade them. They have coercive power over him, both in themselves, by the sheer force of their facticity, and through the control mechanisms that are usually attached to the most important of them. If the individual does not understand the purpose of the institutions or their mode of operation, nothing is detracted from their objective reality. Large sectors of the social world may appear incomprehensible to him, and perhaps their opacity is painful to him, but they nonetheless have real existence. Since institutions exist as an external reality, the individual cannot understand them by introspection. He must 'go out' and learn about them, just as he must to learn about nature. This remains true even though the social world, as a humanly produced reality, is in principle understandable in a way that the natural world is not" (Berger and Luckmann, 1375: 90).

The social world is a human-made world that acquires external objectivity, but ontologically it only gains temporary autonomy and in practice remains dependent on human activity:

"It must always be remembered that the objectivity of the institutional world, however massive it may appear to the individual, is a humanly produced, constructed objectivity. The process by which the externalized products of human activity attain the character of objectivity is objectivation. The institutional world is objectivated human activity, and so is every single institution. In other words, despite the objectivity that marks the social world in human experience, it does not thereby acquire an ontological status apart from the human activity that produced it" (ibid: 90).

Conclusion

Malekian's gross error is that he equates the human-made nature of the social world with its being psychological and individual. He is oblivious to the fact that human individuals who share common characteristics are potentially predisposed to construct a shared subjective world,[7] and those who possess the contextual possibilities for constructing a shared subjective world can, through this, construct the social and also a social group. For example, people who share a common culture, history, and geography, in the modern era have the possibility of creating a social construction called a "nation"; just as in the pre-modern or modern world they create a social construction called an "ethnic group." He imagines that by abstractly and selectively choosing certain criteria, one can gather a group together and thereby forge an identity, live with it, undertake social affairs, and form a durable group. Malekian's view on religions is of the same kind. Instead of belonging to a religious tradition, Malekian advocates religious eclecticism; one of the major problems of the project of Rationality and Spirituality. In the words of Charles Davis, "To belong to no tradition is to fall into an abstract and empty universalism—abstract because it is limited to the formal and therefore repeatable aspects of culture; empty because it lacks the unique concrete substance of cultural reality. The eclecticism of a self-made religion is an attempt to fill this void" (Davis, 1387: 278). It is precisely this "abstract and empty universalism" that we witness in Malekian's discussion of national identity:

"Perhaps the question arises: can one live without identity? Everyone defines themselves both to themselves and to others. Well, we too define ourselves: we are Iranian. We are Iranian Muslims. Some say modern Iranian Muslims. I say, if identity is the problem, wherever you are, say you are from planet Earth, and therefore a cosmopolitan. Your creed is truth-seeking and benevolence; your kin, all the good people of all times. Whoever cares for humanity is my kin. Others are not my kin. Others are not my kin, but that does not mean I wish to destroy them. Therefore, I am a person, a cosmopolitan. Where are you from? From planet Earth. If one day beings are found in another solar system, I will no longer say I am from planet Earth. I will say I am from the solar system. And I am kin to all the good people of all times" (Malekian).

The esteemed Iranian thinker, Ali Shariati, years ago criticized this kind of "crude and inadequate universalism" (Davis, 2008: 277) under the title of intellectualism:

"There are many issues where a gap, sometimes to the point of opposition and contradiction, exists between the mental concept and its theoretical image on the one hand, and the objective instance and practical realization on the other. This is one of the great pitfalls for intellectuals, because the intellectual, fundamentally, due to their main task being 'thinking' and being distanced from 'action,' easily finds themselves in a mental atmosphere, becoming more or less detached from what transpires in the earthly world of objective and practical realities. They live in a world where often 'abstract philosophical ideas,' 'rational abstract causality,' and 'judgments derived from prior opinions and beliefs' evoke one another and collectively form an ideology for them, which creates two lenses for them through which they view everything" (Shariati, 2002: 119).

* Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Central Tehran Branch, Islamic Azad University

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References

Abazari, Yousef (2015) "The Isolation of Sociology." Farhang-e Emrooz website, published: April 30, 2015, accessed: May 2, 2015, The-Isolation-of-Sociology.

Berger, Peter L. and Luckmann, Thomas (1996) The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Translated by Fariborz Majidi. Tehran: Scientific and Cultural Publishing Company, first edition.

Davis, Charles (2008) Religion and the Making of Society: Essays in Social Theology. Translated by Hassan Mohaddesi and Hossein Babolhavaeji. Tehran: Yadevaran Publishing, first edition.

Shariati, Ali (2002) Rediscovering Iranian-Islamic Identity, Collected Works 27. Tehran: Elham Publications, seventh edition.

Malekian, Mostafa (2015) "The Primacy of Culture and the Critique of Sociology." Lecture by Professor Malekian at the Farda-ye Pars Educational and Research Institute. Mashhad, July 2015.

Malekian, Mostafa (2015) "In Defense of the Primacy of Culture and the Critique of Politicization." Lecture by Professor Mostafa Malekian at the unveiling ceremony for the translation of the book 'Equality and Partiality' by Thomas Nagel. Mashhad, May 27, 2015.

Malekian, Mostafa; Vakili, Shervin; Dadbeh, Asghar (2015) Nationality: Illusion or Reality? An exclusive report by 'Etemad', a debate on nationalism; with the presence of Asghar Dadbeh, Shervin Vakili, and Mostafa Malekian. Etemad newspaper, Monday, August 31, 2015, issue no. 3347, pp. 8-9.

Bauman, Zygmunt (1990) Thinking Sociologically. Blackwell.

Bloor, D. (1983) Wittgenstein: A Social Theory of Knowledge. Macmillan, London.

Moscovici, Serege (1993) The Invention of Society: Psychological Explanations for Social Phenomena.Translated by W. D. Halls. Polity Press.

Searle, John R. (2006) Social Ontology: Some Basic Principle. Anthropological Theory. Sage Publication. http://ant.sagepub.com/content/6/1/12

Sibeon, Roger (2004) Rethinking Social Theory. Sage Publication

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Psychological Reductionism in the Works of Mostafa Malekian

Author: Hassan Mohaddesi

Source: Issue 18 of Iran-e Farda Magazine (15 Azar 1394, pp. 60-64)

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