A Dual-Perspective Analysis of Alienation in Ali Shariati’s Thought: Idealist and Materialist Approaches

Salehi, Hadi

doi:10.22059/jstmt.2025.398976.1809

Document Type : Research Article / Original Article

Author

Hadi Salehi

Assistant Professor of Public Law at Shiraz University

https://doi.org/10.22059/jstmt.2025.398976.1809

Abstract

Although the concept of alienation has been explained within a broadly shared semantic framework across diverse intellectual traditions, it remains ontologically plural and contested with respect to its nature and meaning. Nevertheless, thinkers have repeatedly mobilized alienation to critique existing realities and to articulate alternative, desirable social conditions. Whether the criticized condition is understood as emerging from a material contradiction between social classes or groups, or as a primarily discursive formation, largely determines whether alienation is theorized on an idealist or materialist basis. In general, Søren Kierkegaard, G. W. F. Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach, Max Stirner, and several nihilist and existentialist thinkers (e.g., Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre) have addressed alienation primarily within an idealist register. By contrast, Karl Marx and Frantz Fanon have employed the concept in materialist analyses. Among Iranian revolutionary thinkers, Ali Shariati makes extensive use of alienation. This study argues that Shariati’s treatment of alienation integrates both idealist and materialist dimensions. At times, however, methodological ambiguities in his work contribute to conceptual confusion or, at minimum, reduce the theoretical coherence of his definitions. Shariati’s materialist dimension is most visible in his analysis of cultural alienation and assimilation into foreign culture—an emphasis that may reflect the perceived clarity of antagonism between “native” and “foreign” cultural formations, reinforced by discourses of dependency, self-sufficiency, and “return to the self.” By contrast, class-based and intra-societal material antagonisms appear more ambiguous in Shariati’s context, given the incomplete formation of class structures and civil society in contemporary Iran. It is in this domain that Shariati’s account tends to assume a more idealist form.

Keywords

Main Subjects

Rereading and interpreting the ideas of leading Muslim thinkers

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Social Theories of Muslim Thinkers

A Dual-Perspective Analysis of Alienation in Ali Shariati’s Thought: Idealist and Materialist Approaches

References

References

Volume 15, Issue 4
December 2025
Pages 91-112

A Dual-Perspective Analysis of Alienation in Ali Shariati’s Thought: Idealist and Materialist Approaches

References

References

Volume 15, Issue 4December 2025Pages 91-112

Volume 15, Issue 4
December 2025
Pages 91-112