Social Theory in the Social Imaginary of the Contemporary Iran

This paper, the history of social thought in contemporary Iran, is devised through the examination of two concepts: 'social theory' and 'social imaginary'.The confrontation of the Iranians with modern and systematic thoughts about the social is what distinguishes contemporary social thoughts from former ones. These systematic thoughts that are named “social theory”, roughly one century ago were brought to the Iranian social imaginary by translating into the Persian language. The purpose of this paper is to study the consequences of this confrontation in the Iranian social imaginary and therefore in the contemporary social thoughts. Social theory is the result of a moment when the social becomes the object of knowledge, and so each social theory is related to temporality and spatiality of the social. 'Social imaginary' is a category of understanding social praxis and the reasons people give to make sense of these practices.” Social imaginary is the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations. It is not simply a cluster of intellectual ideas about social relations or explicit social theory, but rather it is what determines how people formulate such social theories and how they interpret their selves and the society in its totality. The history of contemporary social thoughts was shaped by confrontation of social imaginary with various social theories which the Iranian thinkers have derived from different knowledge traditions of the European countries. They have applied these theories to interpret and explain their social facts and gradually the Iranian social imaginary was changed. The relationship between mental life and social life was damaged and the sociological ideologies replaced the explanation of Iranian social life. In this paper, through a critical reconsideration of social thought in contemporary Iran, the changes in contemporary social imaginary are examined.