Learning to Dissent

Ramin Jahanbegloo’s crisp and ill­uminating work on dissent is at once timely and an untimely contribution. The latter because it brings together a recent, global and modern history of social justice and liberation thought with the Enlightenment and Socratic traditions of philosophy. Such work is bound to present a perpetual provocation to thought. The former
because in doing so, the philosopher provides a veritable wealth of res­ources necessary to recharge the democratic practice of dissent, which is not only being pushed back but also increasingly separated from pedagogy. The work must be read to understand anew the profound expanse and horizon of dissent—the ontological and epistemological status of dissent for being human, for their commitment to justice, and their chances of realising the democratic promise of equality.

The author chooses four central figures to weave and illustrate this expansive ground of dissent, setting up a larger dialogue among these figures, standing in diverse contexts, speaking to heterogeneous traditions, to different interlocutors and taking diverse, even mutually conflicting ways to dissent. The book does not explicitly justify the selection but the reasons seem evident from the twofold thematic emphases, the urgency of a democratic education and renewing the allegiance to the oppressed. Jahanbegloo thus selects Malcolm X, Paulo Freire, Gustavo Gutiérrez, and B R Ambedkar. They also stand for other related concerns, like that of dialogue, community and institutions that we will try to briefly unpack below.