Book Review: Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring, by Asef Bayat

• Author: Arash Davari
• Published date: 01 June 2019
• Date: 01 June 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0090591718771084
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

418 Political Theory 47(3)

the far egalitarian edges of a liberal position. Few follow this logic as far and

effectively as Chambers does. Those of a certain liberal bent will be troubled

by what they see. But Chambers makes a very compelling case that feminists

and comprehensive liberals need to follow her lead. If she’s right, then the

questions about how, if at all, state action in defense of equality might be lim-

ited and, ultimately, what conception of equality she—we—endorse become

especially pressing. If, for example, we take the demand for structural equality

seriously, can we hang onto the sovereign agent, the priority of choice, and the

distinction between public and private, politics and society at the heart of the

liberal tradition?

Chambers leads us to these questions by bringing us to the edge of the

liberal feminist frontier. This alone would make Against Marriage a distinct

and important contribution. But, of course, Chambers does more. She offers

a compelling vision of why and how to move beyond marriage and points us

in the direction of work that needs to be done. All with the grace and gra-

ciousness of an analytical philosopher running at full throttle.

Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring, by Asef Bayat.

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. 312 pp.

Reviewed by: Arash Davari, Whitman College, Walla Walla, WA, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0090591718771084

Becoming a poet has become a common practice in Iran. People, without

knowing anything about the rules of poetry, put words together abruptly and,

using weird thoughts, believe they are creating poetry. . . . [T]o cover their own

illiteracy, some poets claim that the grammatical conventions in poetry are

nonsense and have to be discarded altogether. Is this desire to throw out the old

the reason why millions of people poured into the streets and kicked the Shah

out without understanding what could happen next?1

In Shahrnush Parsipur’s 1989 novella, Women Without Men, four women find

refuge in a villa on the outskirts of Iran’s capital in the midst of 1953’s coup

d’état, a villa where a fifth woman has planted herself as a tree. Almost to the

letter, the story recalls Michel Foucault’s reference to “traditional Persian

gardens” as a sort of heterotopia—“happy and universalizing” sites located

between myth and reality, at a remove from society, where “the whole world

comes to enact its symbolic perfection.”2 But Parsipur is less hopeful of the

possibilities afforded by “other spaces.” The villa belongs to Farrokhlaqa