A REPLY TO NIKKI R. KEDDIE

Abstract

I thank Professor Nikki R. Keddie for her constructive critique and am using this opportunity to clarify a few points. First, let me reiterate that I do not consider statist approaches to be “wrong,” but “one-sided,” and that I am not calling for their disposal but for “trying out new sources and perspectives then fusing them with state-centered perspectives into a broader panorama of Pahlavi Iran” (pp. 38–39). I see neither “sins” nor “an ongoing struggle between ‘statists’ and ‘antistatists.’” Such language would undercut a productive debate now and disregard the fact that in the long run—as some excesses of the cultural turn in the 1980s and many historians' subsequent search for new historiographic syntheses demonstrate—the pendulum always swings back.