Ezzatollah Fooladvand

Ezzatollah Fooladvand was born on 26 December 1935 (5 Dey 1314) in Isfahan. His father, Gholamreza Fooladvand, was a judge and member of parliament, and his grandfather, Azizollah Khan Fooladvand, was also a political figure and parliamentary representative. He completed part of his primary and secondary education in Tehran and England, then went to Paris to study medicine; but after reading Bertrand Russell's The Problems of Philosophy, he abandoned medicine and went to the United States to study philosophy. He completed his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in philosophy at Columbia University in New York under professors including Arthur Danto, Robert Cumming, and Sidney Morgenbesser.

From 1964 to 1980, Fooladvand held various positions at the National Iranian Oil Company and the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Finance, while also pursuing cultural work and translation. His first major translation, Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom (1969), earned him the title of "Distinguished Translator in Social Sciences" in 1971. He went on to translate a book about Albert Camus (1970) and Hannah Arendt's essay On Violence — a translation undertaken at a time when revolutionary violence was being sanctified by various political currents in Iran, with Fooladvand, standing apart from the left-right divide, opening a new path for the post-revolutionary generation's engagement with liberal political philosophy.

Among his most significant works are his translation of Hannah Arendt's Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy (published in Persian as Kant's Philosophy, which won Iran's Book of the Year award in its eighth cycle), H. Stuart Hughes's Consciousness and Society (winner of the Book of the Year award in the ninth cycle), Bryan Magee's Men of Ideas and The Great Philosophers (featuring conversations about major Western philosophers with contemporary thinkers), Jeremy Shearmur's The Political Thought of Karl Popper, Karl Jaspers's Philosophical Autobiography and Nietzsche and Christianity, and Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly — the last of which won Iran's "Distinguished Book of the Year" award in 2001.

Fooladvand is renowned among Iranian translators for his linguistic precision, his meticulous search for authentic Persian equivalents of philosophical concepts, and his fidelity to the intellectual nuances of the source text. More than merely a translator, through his selection of works on freedom, the open society, critiques of totalitarian ideologies, and Kantian political philosophy, he has become one of the most important conduits through which Persian-speaking readers have engaged with the twentieth-century tradition of liberal political thought.