Beauty and Tyranny

Iran: Beauty and Tyranny cuts to the heart of Iran’s struggle with despotism, which author Ramin Jahanbegloo calls its ‘syndrome of tyranny’. The book calls for a reengagement with beauty as an antidote to authoritarianism, a methodology of freedom taught by the philosophers of ancient Greece and the German Enlightenment.

From Cyrus the Great to the present day, Iran has been plagued by a recurrent syndrome of tyranny. For Ramin Jahanbegloo, the cure for this lies in a reengagement with the idea of a beautiful society. He presents beauty as an antidote to authoritarianism, and as a methodology of freedom: one first taught by the philosophers of ancient Greece, who bound beauty and goodness together in the principle of kalokagathia, and later revived by the German Enlightenment.

A work of hope and of faith in the people of Iran, this provocative and timely intervention from the author of The Idea of Persia turns to the past in order to imagine a way forward. Drawing on Hegel, Schiller, Arendt, Camus and more, Jahanbegloo lays out a vision of how Iran and Iranians might come to live in beautiful freedom.