historical materialism

In my recently published book, Capitalism in Contemporary Iran: Capital accumulation, State Formation, and Geopolitics, by Manchester University Press in the Progress in Political Economy (PPE) Series, I offer an alternative narrative to state formation in Iran grounded in a historical materialist perspective. Drawing on the social ontology of the philosophy of internal relations, the book argues for the importance of tracing the changes in the patterns of capital accumulation and the resulting shifts in class and state formation in Iran within the development of the wider capitalist world market during the neoliberal era to overcome the pervasive methodological nationalism and exceptionalising frameworks.

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One of the grand traditions of the Past & Present Reading Group is “the pitch.” As we near the end of our current text, those who have engaged with it are given the opportunity to nominate the next book that the group will tackle. At risk of doing an injustice to any selfless members of the group, I would suggest that most pitches combine two motives of the pitcher: on the one hand, a genuine feeling that a collective reading of the suggested text will pay dividends to all members; on the other, a more prosaic, self-interested desire to recommend a book that is important to their own work and which they want to read anyway. Such was definitely the case when I pitched Alex Callinicos’ Making History: Agency, Structure, and Change in Social Theory.

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