Political Science

Arash Abizadeh

Passionate about reason

Bronwyn Chester | In many spheres of life -- politics, science, law -- there's the notion that reason ought to prevail over passion. But Arash Abizadeh isn't of the opinion that the purportedly rival siblings are polar opposites. Au contraire. "I'm trying to show we don't have to think of reason that way," says the political theorist, a recently hired professor in the Department of Political Science. "Aristotle, for instance, believed that reason is the organizing of the passions."

Owen Egan

In political theory there's the idea of praxis, or practical reason, says Abizadeh between sips of his soup in an Iranian restaurant in his new neighbourhood of Mile End. "Practical, meaning what ought to be done, it's the should."

He points to Nelson Mandela as an example of someone for whom the emotions, the passions, informed his reason, and made him uncompromising in his beliefs regarding the equality of all, even in the face of adversity. "When Mandela was on Robin Island, the prison guards were won over by him. They are now his friends."

Abizadeh, who grew up in Winnipeg, comes to McGill from Wesleyan University in Connecticut where he taught for the past three years while completing his doctoral thesis from Harvard University, "Rhetoric, the passions and the difference in discursive democracy." Before that he was at Oxford for two years on a Rhodes Scholarship after completing his BA at the University of Winnipeg.

With a long-time interest in the social sciences, Abizadeh settled on political theory "because it's where they both meet." In the class he teaches on the history of political theory, the young prof wants his students to share in his excitement of the reading material and develop the "capacity to examine their own assumptions."

Abizadeh is happy to be back in Canada. "I wanted to return to Canada, and McGill and Montreal are among the best places in the country for political theory," he says, noting that the city is home of the Montreal Political Theory Workshop, an association for all four of the island's universities.

In addition to studying the place of emotion in reason, Abizadeh's research interests include the work of the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and contemporary German philosopher Jurgen Habermas' democratic theory. On this particular Friday, a day reserved for writing, Abizadeh is critiquing the theory that a state needs a single national culture in order to function as a democracy.

By this theory, Europe won't work, says Abizadeh. It's a view he contests partly because he sees evidence to the contrary in a country like Canada. But it's also to do with his view of how the world ought to be. The son of economists, immigrants from Iran, Abizadeh was raised in the Baha'i tradition. At 15, he decided to adopt his parents' faith, a worldwide religion founded in the 19th century whose central principal is the unity of the human race.

"There's a premium Baha'is place on overcoming social barriers, on creating community and fellowship. We shouldn't be parochial," he says. "It's an ethical outlook that's part of the faith."

In the vein of building bridges between people of various origins and languages -- not to mention, simply having a good time -- Abizadeh has organized a weekly cinq-a-sept for all new faculty members in the city. It was a bit of a struggle getting the email addresses from some of the universities of the 200 new academics in the city, he notes with a wry smile indicating that this is an understatement, but his efforts have panned out. "There's an average of 15 people who come out," he says.