Reasonableness, rationality and government

Mehdi Haeri Yazdi's Hekmat va hokumat

pp. 123-148

in: Meysam Badamchi, Post-islamist political theory, Berlin, Springer, 2017

Abstract

This chapter deals with Mehdi Haeri Yazdi's political theory, starting with an overview of Rawls's ideas of reasonableness and rationality in Political Liberalism. Based on this initial step, the second part considers what may be called Haeri's argument about the priority of Islamic philosophy over Islamic jurisprudence and his thesis of government as the agency of joint private owners, based on traditional notions of the agency compact (aqd-e vekalat) and joint private ownership (malekiyat-e shakhsi-ye musha) in traditional jurisprudence. I then present Haeri's defense of individualism against collectivism, and his linguistic distinction between the universal (kolli) and the whole (koll), which aims to criticize Rousseau's notion of general will. I also analyze Haeri's post-Islamist claim that, because the voluntary nature of sharia is incompatible with the coercive nature of state power, the idea of an Islamic state is contradictory. This chapter also includes an overview of Haeri's meta-ethics, which takes a critical stance towards M.H.Tabatabai's artificial conceptions theory. The chapter also includes critical remarks on Haeri's reading of Roussau's idea of the general will.