Bøker av Charles Kurzman

A 1978 CIA analysis firmly concluded that the shah of Iran would remain on the throne for the foreseeable future. One hundred days later the shah was overthrown by a popular revolution. The CIA was not alone in its myopia, as Kurzman reveals; Iranians themselves considered a revolution inconceivable until it actually occurred.

Mining newspaper accounts, memoirs, and government reports, Kurzman proposes that the collective agent most directly responsible for democratization was the emerging class of modern intellectuals, a group that had gained a global identity and a near-messianic sense of mission following the Dreyfus Affair of 1898.