Everyday Freedom

Iranian intellectuals—whether those who call themselves reformists and emphasize “nonviolent struggle” and “gradual reform,” or those who wander through utopias or new interpretations of religion—have for years explained freedom as an absolute, final, and ultimate concept. For them, freedom is either complete or it does not exist at all. It is either “the real emancipation of the human being,” or it remains total captivity. This view is rooted in a particular philosophical tradition that sees freedom as something abstract, textual, and otherworldly; a tradition that, in practice, has created a deep distance from the reality of everyday life for the people of Iran.

This distance is not necessarily born of malice or conspiracy, but of a profound intellectual weakness. When exposed, that weakness reveals how incapable philosophical absolutism is, in a significant part of the Iranian intelligentsia, of understanding the real conditions that make freedom possible in an actual society composed of actual human beings. Naturally, there are exceptions; my criticism is directed at the dominant “all-or-nothing” tendency in understanding freedom, not at everyone who thinks or writes seriously.

Two Opposing Philosophies

The Iranian intellectual mostly seeks freedom in books: either in Western liberal texts, or in new interpretations of religious texts, or in leftist ideals of justice. In all these cases, freedom is imagined as a “complete system” that must be realized all at once and from above. The result is that every small, tangible, everyday step toward freedom is dismissed as “insufficient,” “trivial,” “deceptive,” or even “aligned with the regime.” He keeps repeating: “This is not real freedom yet,” “We must still wait,” “The structures have not changed,” “Complete justice has not been achieved.”

By contrast, the people of Iran have for years been experiencing and advancing, in practice, a social philosophy of life. For them, freedom is not an abstract ideal in a book or a speech, but a set of entirely tangible, everyday experiences: being able to listen to the music they love without fear of arrest; going to a concert without being beaten; wearing the clothes they choose without harassment by the morality police; buying a car and paying for gasoline without anxiety; eating an ordinary meal without calculating every rial; traveling inside or outside the country without endless obstacles; sitting in a café or a park without being interrogated about hijab, music, or companions.

These are not “trivial freedoms.” They are precisely what gives freedom meaning in real life.

The uprising of Dey 1396 / January 2018 began exactly from this point: terrifying inflation, the free fall of the rial against the dollar, the rising price of bread, meat, and gasoline, widespread unemployment, and total despair about the future of livelihood. People first came into the streets in Mashhad and then in dozens of small and large cities, crying out that they could no longer live. Many intellectuals later called this uprising “economic,” and some even said with contempt that “it was not political; it was only about stomachs.” But that was precisely the point: people had understood, with their bodies and their pockets, that without a tolerable economic life, no lofty concept of freedom has any meaning. Those protests showed that real freedom for the people is this very “everyday liberty,” not the promise of a utopia on some distant horizon.

The Philosophical Weakness of Absolutism

The absolutist view of Iranian intellectualism is weak in several fundamental ways, and that weakness cannot be hidden by making concepts more complicated.

First, this view separates freedom from the real conditions that make it possible. Ideal freedom, without an open economy, without respect for private property, without the possibility of free production and consumption, without everyday judicial and police security, is nothing but an empty slogan. The intellectual either ignores these foundations or postpones them to “the next stage of revolution/reform/emancipation.” He does not see that everyday economic and social freedoms are precisely the practical exercise of freedom that prepares society for higher stages.

Second, it separates freedom from time and human experience. If freedom only has meaning in an “ideal future,” then it is meaningless for living human beings today. A free person is someone who can choose today, breathe today, listen to music today, travel today. A freedom that becomes possible only after some grand, sudden transformation is not freedom in practice; it is a promise.

This weakness is rooted in an idealist philosophical tradition that begins with Plato. In The Republic, Plato designed an ideal society ruled by philosopher-kings on the basis of absolute knowledge, where ordinary people were expected to accept their assigned place. Rousseau, with the concept of the “general will,” turned freedom into something beyond individual choice and opened the way to coercion in the name of “real freedom.” Hegel saw the historical spirit manifested in the complete and rational state, and defined freedom as submission to this historical process. Marx, too—in his critique of “bourgeois” freedoms such as property, contract, consumption, and leisure—believed that these freedoms alone did not lead to the emancipation of human beings from structures of inequality and domination, and he imagined the horizon of “real human emancipation” in a classless society. Taken together, in this tradition, freedom was largely seen as final and all-at-once, while everyday freedoms were either ignored or considered insignificant beside that ultimate horizon.

The experience of the twentieth century showed exactly where this idealism leads. Societies that moved forward through central planning and the promise of “real freedom”—the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, Cuba, North Korea—did not arrive at freedom. They arrived at total despotism, widespread poverty, and the destruction of millions of human lives. The issue was not merely the “evil of individuals.” When everyday freedoms—property, movement, expression, choice of lifestyle—are suspended in the name of “future emancipation,” the machinery of coercion constantly grows larger. The state or party is inevitably driven to police life itself, and the promise of emancipation becomes a permanent mechanism of control. Those who pursued “liberation” through central planning became the founders and agents of some of the most tyrannical regimes in history. This is exactly the historical weakness: the inability to see that real freedom begins with small, everyday freedoms, not with designing a utopia from above.

A Theoretical Defense of Negative Liberty and Gradual Reform

Against this idealist tradition stood thinkers who saw freedom as real, gradual, and tangible.

Isaiah Berlin, in his famous essay “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958), drew precisely this distinction. Negative liberty—the very freedom ordinary people want—means the sphere within which a person can act without interference from others. Freedom from chains, from prison, from the harassment of the morality police, from music censorship, from fear when buying gasoline. Berlin emphasized that this negative liberty is the precondition of every other freedom. Positive liberty—self-realization, real emancipation, complete justice—is of course a noble goal. But when it replaces negative liberty, or is placed before it, it quickly becomes a justification for coercion and tyranny. In that situation, someone—the philosopher, the party, the state, the intellectual—claims: “I know what real freedom is,” and then forces people to reach it. Berlin warned that this was exactly the road that led to twentieth-century totalitarianism.

Karl Popper, too, in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), distinguished between two approaches: utopian or holistic social engineering, which wants to remake all of society according to a “blueprint,” and piecemeal social engineering, which solves real and tangible problems one by one and tests the results. Popper showed that the utopian approach is not only unscientific, but leads to violence and the suppression of dissent, because one cannot experiment on real human beings.

In Iran, Popper’s followers—especially among religious intellectuals—repeated precisely this mistake. Abdolkarim Soroush, more than anyone else, introduced Popper into the Persian intellectual sphere, but he tried to combine Popper’s ideas with an Islamic intellectual structure. The result was an incoherent mixture: neither pure, critical Popperianism nor a religion compatible with Iran’s social and economic realities. The attempt to use Popperian tools for the “contraction and expansion of religious knowledge” ultimately failed to prioritize everyday freedom. It became, instead, a complex theoretical project whose distance from the street and from people’s lives grew larger every day.

Friedrich Hayek, in The Road to Serfdom and Law, Legislation and Liberty, also emphasized that without the spontaneous order of the market, private property, and everyday economic freedoms, no “ideal freedom” is possible. Central planning for complete justice always leads to the destruction of freedom and to poverty, because no one can collect the dispersed knowledge of millions of human beings.

The irony of history is that even Hegel himself—whose leftist followers more than anyone else degraded everyday freedom—had, in his mature work Philosophy of Right (1820), reached something close to this conclusion. The later Hegel emphasized that freedom cannot be realized without tangible institutions: property rights, civil society, contract, the judicial system, and the rule of law. He regarded civil society—with all its market exchange and individual rights—not as a secondary or passing stage, but as the necessary ground for the realization of real freedom. But Marx and the left Hegelians set precisely this part aside: they took Hegel’s revolutionary dialectic, called the institutional foundations of freedom “bourgeois,” and threw them away. History showed the result. From this point onward, the right and left Hegelians parted ways—and what reached Iran was mostly the leftist reading: the promise of absolute emancipation without the tangible foundations of freedom.

Someone may say that this is merely a shift in dependency: instead of Marx and Hegel, now Berlin and Hayek. But the fundamental difference is here: Berlin, Popper, and Hayek do not prescribe a one-time formula for “emancipation.” They offer a framework that makes freedom measurable, gradual, and testable—and more importantly, this framework is exactly what the people of Iran have already reached through lived experience. This is not the importation of an ideology; it is the recognition of something people already know.

These three lines of thought say exactly what the people of Iran have understood with their flesh and blood: if from the very beginning you try to impose positive liberty by force of ideology and central planning, negative liberty is the first sacrifice—and in the end, the promised positive liberty is never achieved either. Positive liberty, if it is to acquire any real meaning, must rest on the shoulders of established negative liberty: freedom from fear, from harassment, from censorship, from state interference in people’s lives and livelihoods.

The Iranian Roots of Everyday Freedom: Zoroaster and the Constitutional Revolution

This view, which sees freedom in law, security, and everyday experience, is not merely Western. In the Iranian tradition as well, it has brilliant examples that have often been marginalized or distorted throughout history.

More than twenty-five hundred years ago, Zoroaster defined freedom in the Gathas as moral free will in daily life: the daily choice between asha—truth, order—and the Lie. “Good thoughts, good words, good deeds”: this formula places freedom not in escape from the world, but in right action within this world. Not the promise of paradise on earth, but individual responsibility at every moment. Here, I am speaking of Zoroaster as an ethical foundation for “individual choice,” not trying to equate him one-to-one with modern legal and institutional concepts.

After Islam, however, this view came under severe pressure. Dominant Islamic jurisprudence either treated everyday freedom as “bad teachings” and “worldly” distraction, or forcibly eliminated it. Freedom of choosing music, clothing, travel, free trade, or even independent thought was often dismissed under labels such as “lust,” “neglect of the afterlife,” or “sedition.”

Mysticism offered another answer—an answer that was beautiful on the surface but defeated in practice. The great Iranian mystics understood very well that the Islamic juridical order was incompatible with individual freedom. But instead of fighting this order and trying to build a space of objective freedom, they chose escape: escape inward, liberation from the “self,” annihilation in God, and the devaluation of material and everyday life. We Iranians rightly admire the poetry of Hafez, Rumi, and Attar—they created a space for the Iranian spirit to breathe at the height of oppression. But we must honestly admit that mysticism was, in the long run, a vulnerable and defeated strategy. Instead of fighting for tangible freedom—freedom from harassment, from censorship, from imposed ways of life—it transferred freedom into the inner and spiritual realm, and in practice became a refuge that reduced the pressure for real change. Mysticism taught Iranians that one could be “free” even in chains—and this lesson, however poetic and beautiful, prevented for centuries the demand for real negative liberty. But mysticism did not break the chains of despotic rulers.

The important point is this: my criticism of mysticism is criticism of it as a historical strategy for confronting juridical Islam. The mystics were honorable people who, in their difficult circumstances, did the best they could and left behind deep moral effects. But their intellectual legacy—when modern Iranian intellectuals reproduce it and continue to seek “emancipation” in the spiritual and theoretical realm—reproduces exactly the same distance from everyday freedom. The arrow of criticism here is not aimed at the mystics of the seventh century; it is aimed at the intellectuals of the twenty-first century who still repeat the same pattern of inward escape—this time in the language of philosophy and reformism.

In the Constitutional Revolution, this Zoroastrian-Iranian view came alive again. Thinkers such as Mirza Yusef Khan Mostashar al-Dowleh, in One Word, said that the secret of civilization was “one word”: law. A law that would secure life and property, grant freedom of press and expression, and end the arbitrariness of rulers—not a utopia to be realized tomorrow. Mirza Malkom Khan, in the newspaper Qanun, summarized freedom as the end of arbitrariness and the establishment of everyday security. And Ahmad Kasravi, the sharpest critic of abstract intellectuals, emphasized that freedom without practical reason in real life is only a slogan. Kasravi, with insight, accused bookish intellectuals of being far removed from the life of the people and of wandering in the clouds.

But a major strategic error also occurred in the Constitutional experience—an error whose shadow still hangs over Iranian politics today: a significant portion of the constitutionalists, in order to confront the Qajars, decided to bring the clergy into politics, because they knew that the clerics had both a “platform”—the mosque—and social influence over the general population. This tactical alliance may have had short-term utility, but in the long run its price was disastrous: the lasting bond between religion and politics, and Iran’s failure to reach real secularism. From then on, the clergy—in various forms—always considered itself entitled to intervene in politics, while politics was structurally deprived of the possibility of institutional separation between religion and government. Today, if everyday freedom and negative liberty are truly to be established, this trajectory must be completely corrected: secularism, meaning “no religion and no clergy, in religious garb, in politics and governance,” is not a decorative slogan but a precondition of lasting freedom. In fact, it is more compatible with many authentic forms of religiosity as well, because it separates religion from the instruments of power, political corruption, and state repression.

1979: The Complete Example

If anyone doubts where the suspension of negative liberty in the name of positive liberty leads, it is enough to look at the 1979 Revolution. Pre-revolutionary Iran was not a flawless society—no society is flawless—but Iran was on a path of expanding negative liberties and was moving forward at remarkable speed. Both Pahlavis, with all their shortcomings, had taken Iran from the ruins left by the Qajar era—absolute poverty, insecurity, lawlessness, zero infrastructure—to a rapidly growing economy, modern universities, a network of health and transportation, and broad social freedoms. Women studied, traveled, and worked. Property was respected. People listened to music, went to the cinema, wore the clothes they wanted. These negative liberties—though incomplete and still developing—were the real ground of life. In some areas, social and economic negative liberties had expanded, even though there were limitations in the political sphere and in party organization.

But intellectuals—leftists, Islamists, and even many liberals—instead of trying to deepen and complete these very negative liberties and add political positive liberty upon that foundation, decided to set everything on fire. The leftists degraded “bourgeois freedom” and promised “real emancipation.” The Islamists called social and cultural freedoms “Western corruption” and promised an ideal Islamic society. The liberals, naively, thought they could ally with the leftists and Islamists and later obtain the freedoms they wanted. None of them understood that positive liberty and negative liberty cannot be separated—and that if you destroy the foundation of negative liberty, positive liberty will never be built either.

The result? A poisonous ideological mixture: Marxist leftism, juridical political Islam, and spineless liberalism all joined together to destroy the existing order and put nothing defensible in its place. This mixture produced a destructive cycle: increasing restrictions, radicalization in politics, more repression, and then still more restrictions—until, in 1979, everything was set ablaze. From then on, the only real losers were the people and their freedoms. No positive liberty was achieved, and the previous negative liberties were not preserved. For a strand of hair outside the headscarf, countless women were beaten, tortured, and killed. Exactly what Berlin had warned about came to pass.

And this cycle of death still continues. In the recent Dey, when people once again came into the streets under economic pressure and the collapse of the rial, they received bullets instead of reform. On the 18th and 19th of Dey, the regime launched an unprecedented massacre—according to multiple news reports and hospital sources, more than 36,500 people were killed in those two days alone. The people had economic demands—the same everyday freedom from imposed poverty—and the system answered them with blood. This massacre was the largest killing in the history of the Islamic Republic, and it showed that a system built on the ruins of negative liberties ultimately has only one instrument: violence.

The People Are Ahead

Iran’s recent uprisings—from Dey 1396 / January 2018 to the Mahsa uprising to the Dey 1404 uprising—showed that the people have understood precisely this social philosophy of life. Slogans such as “Woman, Life, Freedom” and “Man, Homeland, Prosperity” were, at their deepest level, crying out for the same thing: a free life, today; in the street, in the university, at home, at a concert, in clothing, in music, at the dinner table, in the car, and at the gas pump. The people are no longer willing to entrust freedom to an imaginary future. They want freedom in everyday experience, because they have understood that only this freedom has meaning and only this freedom has value within the span of a human life.

Some intellectuals, however, are still sitting in libraries or theoretical meetings, prescribing “ethical” formulas for the people: “Now is not the time for struggle,” “We must still wait,” “Freedom is not possible without complete justice,” “This is only economic, not political.” These prescriptions are issued by regime reformists, academic leftists, and religious intellectuals alike—they each have different languages, but their shared intellectual structure is the same absolutism: they defer freedom to “the next stage” and treat everyday life as insignificant. These prescriptions do not necessarily arise from malice, but from a philosophical inability to understand the social reality of life.

Conclusion: These Ways of Thinking Must Be Cleared Away

Some Iranian intellectuals, not necessarily out of conspiracy but out of profound intellectual weakness, have fallen behind the nation. Their absolutism in defining freedom has placed freedom out of reach and turned it into an eternal promise; while the people, through their social philosophy of life, have brought freedom down to earth, touched it, and paid a price for it every day.

The time has come to set aside these religious-intellectual perspectives—the same mixture of ideal freedom and leftist concoctions formulated in religious frameworks—from the agenda of thought. The attempt to blend and harmonize incompatible philosophical projects—from Popper to Hegel and Marx—with sharia and mysticism has in practice produced mostly complex but ineffective and illusory conceptual machines; prescriptions that have neither brought freedom closer nor understood the reality of everyday life.

Instead, we must take one simple principle seriously: the final goal is complete freedom—both negative and positive. We want self-realization, political participation, justice, and emancipation. But reaching this goal has one unavoidable precondition: negative liberty. Freedom from harassment, from fear, from censorship, from state interference in the economy and in people’s private lives. This precondition is necessary but not sufficient—no one should stop at negative liberty alone. But without it, positive liberty is built on air and collapses. Negative liberty is the foundation of a building whose higher floors are positive liberty. A building cannot stand without a foundation, but a foundation without floors is not a home. The issue is the order of construction, not choosing one instead of the other.

But if, from the very beginning, we try to place the roof without laying the foundation—if we try to “implement” positive liberty through grand prescriptions and central planning—the result is exactly what Berlin warned about, what Popper explained, and what Hayek described in terms of mechanism. And Iranian history, from 1979 to Dey 1404, has written it in the blood of the people: negative liberty is sacrificed, and positive liberty never moves from promise into reality.

So the conclusion is clear:

Everyday freedom is not a “margin”; it is the foundation and ground of higher freedoms.

Suspending small freedoms in the name of great ideals builds not emancipation, but mechanisms of coercion.

The project of a free Iran is, before anything else, the project of law, everyday security, an open economy, and the right to choose one’s way of life—not the project of ultimate, all-at-once promises.

The people of Iran have understood this. It is time for the intellectuals to understand it as well—and to stand with the people’s demand.

References

Berlin, Isaiah. “Two Concepts of Liberty.” In Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969. Originally delivered 1958.

Hayek, Friedrich A. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944.

Hayek, Friedrich A. Law, Legislation and Liberty. 3 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973–1979.

Hegel, G. W. F. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. 1820.

Marx, Karl. “On the Jewish Question.” 1843.

Plato. Republic.

Popper, Karl. The Open Society and Its Enemies. London: Routledge, 1945.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract. 1762.

Soroush, Abdolkarim. Qabz va Bast-e Teorik [The Theoretical Contraction and Expansion of Religion].

Mostashar al-Dowleh, Mirza Yusef Khan. Yek Kalameh [“One Word” periodical].

Malkom Khan, Mirza. Qanun. [“The Law” periodical].

Kasravi, Ahmad. Tarikh-e Mashruteh-ye Iran [History of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution].

Zarathustra. The Gathas.