Mapping Currents of Left-Wing Thought — Part 6
The Left and the Crisis of Building Freedom After Critiquing Authoritarianism
Aydin Areta

Critiquing authoritarianism is the beginning of freedom, but it is not the end of the path. A society that becomes skilled only in exposure, denunciation and condemnation may never learn how to build freedom, carry it, and place it within durable institutions.

This section discusses a wound that has formed in our relationship with authority: a wound that sometimes equates law with violence, boundaries with repression, tradition with domination, and leadership with the return of the despot. Under such conditions, critique becomes sharper while the capacity to build remains weak.

The global left, postmodernism and progressive liberalism each confront this crisis in different ways. They can expose power, but they cannot always create legitimate authority, collective responsibility and institutions that sustain freedom. The danger is that rebellion against authoritarianism may, without recognizing it, reproduce a new form of control and moral policing.

Yet liberation does not require choosing between structureless horizontalism and authoritarian verticalism. Perhaps Iranian political imagination, in its deepest roots, offers another path: a politics centred on *rāsti*—truthfulness and right order—clear, responsible and connected to truth; a place where freedom begins through individuation and continues in the world.

Link to Part Six of the seminar:
https://youtu.be/hw1xXDzHlUM