Michel Foucault and the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran

Wednesday 8 April 2026

The intellectual journey of Michel Foucault into the political upheavals of late twentieth-century Iran remains one of the more perplexing episodes in modern European thought. That a philosopher so closely associated with scepticism towards power, institutions and universalising ideologies should have expressed a degree of sympathy for the Iranian Revolution appears at first glance contradictory. Yet Foucault’s engagement with Iran was neither casual nor naïve; rather, it reflected deeper currents within his philosophical method, his critique of Western modernity, and his fascination with forms of political subjectivity that escaped the established categories of European political theory.

Foucault travelled to Iran in 1978 as a correspondent for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. What he encountered there was in his view not merely a political revolt against the regime of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, but something altogether more elusive — a mass uprising infused with what he described as a form of “political spirituality”. This phrase has since become central to understanding his position. For Foucault the Iranian protests did not fit comfortably within the frameworks of Marxist revolution, liberal reform or nationalist insurrection. Instead, they appeared to represent a collective will grounded in religious identity and moral transformation, rather than in material interests alone.

At the heart of Foucault’s sympathy was his long-standing critique of what he perceived as the suffocating rationalism of Western political systems. His earlier works had charted the emergence of disciplinary institutions — prisons, hospitals, schools — that subtly shaped human behaviour under the guise of reason and progress. In Iran he believed he had found a society rejecting this trajectory. The revolution seemed to him a repudiation of both Western imperial influence and the Shah’s authoritarian modernisation programme, which had imposed rapid secularisation and economic transformation without corresponding political legitimacy.

The figure of Ruhollah Khomeini further intrigued Foucault, not as a conventional political leader but as a symbol of resistance grounded in religious authority. From Foucault’s perspective, Khomeini’s appeal lay in his ability to mobilise a dispersed and heterogeneous population through a shared spiritual language. This stood in stark contrast to the bureaucratic and technocratic elites that dominated Western governance. Foucault did not necessarily endorse the establishment of a theocratic state; rather he appeared captivated by the possibility that religion could serve as a vehicle for collective political agency outside the paradigms of Enlightenment rationality.

There was also a geopolitical dimension to Foucault’s position. The Shah’s regime was widely perceived as a client of Western powers, particularly the United States, and as a beneficiary of external support despite its repressive practices. In aligning himself, however tentatively, with the revolutionary movement, Foucault was implicitly criticising the West’s selective application of its professed values — democracy, human rights and self-determination — when these conflicted with strategic interests. In this respect his writings on Iran formed part of a broader intellectual current in 1970s Europe that sought to decentre Western authority and to take seriously the political aspirations of non-European societies.

Yet Foucault’s interpretation was not without its critics, even at the time. Some contemporaries argued that he had romanticised the revolution, projecting onto it his own philosophical preoccupations while underestimating the concrete political forces at work. The role of clerical networks, the organisational discipline of Islamist groups and the exclusionary potential of religious governance were, they contended, visible even in the early stages of the uprising. Foucault’s emphasis on “political spirituality” risked obscuring these dynamics, rendering him insufficiently attentive to the likely outcomes of the revolution.

With the benefit of hindsight, the question of whether Foucault’s support was warranted must be approached with caution. The establishment of the Islamic Republic under Khomeini brought about a political system that combined elements of republican governance with clerical oversight, enforced through institutions such as the Guardian Council and the Revolutionary Guards. While the revolution did succeed in overthrowing an authoritarian monarchy and asserting Iranian sovereignty free from overt Western control, it also led to new forms of repression, particularly affecting women, political dissidents and minority groups.

From one perspective therefore Foucault’s hopes appear to have been misplaced. The “political spirituality” he admired did not yield a pluralistic or emancipatory political order, but rather a system in which religious authority became institutionalised and, in many respects, coercive. The revolutionary energy that he celebrated was channelled into a state apparatus that proved no less capable of surveillance and discipline than those he had criticised in the West.

However, to dismiss Foucault’s position entirely would be to overlook the nuances of his thought. He was not offering a policy prescription or a detailed endorsement of an Islamic government. Instead he was attempting to interpret an event that challenged the prevailing assumptions of European political theory. In this sense his writings on Iran can be read as an experiment in understanding forms of resistance that do not conform to familiar ideological categories. His error, if it may be called that, lay not in recognising the distinctiveness of the Iranian revolution, but in underestimating the extent to which power, once reconstituted, tends to reproduce structures of domination regardless of its initial form.

Moreover Foucault’s engagement with Iran raises broader questions that remain pertinent today. Can political movements grounded in religious or cultural identity provide viable alternatives to secular liberal democracy? To what extent can external observers, particularly those from different intellectual traditions, accurately interpret such movements without imposing their own frameworks? And is it possible to separate the emancipatory aspirations of a revolution from the institutional realities that follow its success?

Foucault’s support for the Iranian revolution reflects both the strengths and the limitations of his philosophical approach. His willingness to take seriously a non-Western form of political mobilisation demonstrated an openness that was and remains relatively rare. Yet his reluctance to engage fully with the practical implications of revolutionary power left him vulnerable to charges of romanticism. The Iranian revolution in turn stands as a reminder that the rejection of one form of domination does not guarantee the emergence of freedom — a lesson that Foucault himself, had he lived longer, might well have incorporated into his evolving critique of power and modernity.