The rise of the discourse of sustainable development has been fraught with conflict. Initial conceptual ambiguities have led to a conflictual understanding of the meaning of sustainable development, and the basis for action that this understanding implies. This thesis employs a Habermasian analytical framework to assess the competing views on the relationship between sustainable development and...

This paper aims to show the centrality the concept of progress occupies explicitly and implicitly in social theory, in relation to the theorization and understanding of modernity; it also raises the question whether in times where Eurocentrism, logocentrism, and indeed almost every claim of supremacy are rightly viewed with suspicion, it is possible to think of modernity without relying on some...

Background and Objectives: Crude oil is the most important exported product and a major pillar of national economic development. The majority of Iranchr('39')s crude oil exports are shipped from the Kharg oil terminal, which has required the establishment of massive oil facilities and related bureaucratic institutions on Kharg Island. Nonetheless, regardless of its economic benefits for the cou...

The biblical book of Ecclesiastes is often claimed as a harbinger of modernity. In this essay, I compare Ecclesiastes with two overlapping constructions of modernity, taken from Matthew Arnold and Charles Taylor, focusing especially on Taylor’s motifs of inwardness, narrativity, meaninglessness, and ordinary life. I suggest that the likeness to modernity in Ecclesiastes is a complex bundle of e...