Stéphanie Roza, French historian of ideas, political philosopher, research fellow at the CNRS, specializing in the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and their legacy on the left. Her best-known book, La gauche contre les Lumières? (2020), argues that part of the modern left has turned against its own Enlightenment roots — universalism, progressivism, rationalism. Her latest book, co-written with Amirpasha Tavakkoli, is Lumières et anti-Lumières en Iran (2026) — the source of the interview you translated. She also directs the edition of Gracchus Babeuf’s complete works and identifies with a humanist-Marxist, progressive-left tradition.

Your thesis dealt with Morelly, Mably and Babeuf, and with the way utopia became a political program in the 18th century: how does that work anticipate the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment in Iran?

SR: I started out as a specialist of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. The hypothesis guiding my work is essentially the same as that of a few other twentieth-century intellectuals who explicitly claimed the legacy of the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment, such as the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács or the historian Zeev Sternhell. Like them, I believe that the universalism, rationalism and progressivism of the Enlightenment — whose political expression is found above all in the successive Declarations of the Rights of Man — upended the political field and gave rise to the great oppositions and battles characteristic of the contemporary era. On one side, after 1789, the revolutionary crucible gradually gave birth to the two great tendencies of the progressive camp: socialists and liberals, enemy brothers who nonetheless share a common core of principles that is too often underestimated. On the other side, their common adversaries immediately began building a structured response: the conservative camp, in all its diversity, is the result of these theoretical and political efforts. Its representatives were well aware that they could not simply call for a restoration of the old order, but had to propose a new alternative (albeit rooted in the values of the past) to the democratic project of modernity.

This dividing line between the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment, or between progressives and conservatives if you prefer, has structured political camps and ideological struggles for more than two centuries now. I devote my work to studying these ideological struggles in the West but also in the East, because I believe there is no watertight border between the two worlds — quite the opposite. The clash between the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment has been, at least since the end of the 19th century, a universal reality.

Is Ahmad Fardid the source of Iranian Heideggerianism?

SR: Ahmad Fardid is the most famous Iranian........

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