Sharing My Research Into Political Thought
Thank you for your interest and welcome to my site!
You must be ready to burn yourself up in your own flame: how could you rise anew if you did not first become ashes!
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
I am a political theorist at Georgetown University’s Dept of Government, with minors in Philosophy and International Relations.
I was born in Brussels, Belgium and raised in Tehran, Iran, before moving to the United States. The experience of being exposed to different worldviews and diverse ways of life on three different continents has been formative in my approach to political thought in particular and the practice of politics more generally.
Before commencing my doctoral program at Georgetown, I completed a Masters of Arts degree in International Relations and International Economics from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) right here in Washington D.C., and consulted on various projects involving political risk and Middle Eastern politics.
I hold a B.A. (with distinction) in Political Science as well as Near Eastern Studies (specializing in Iranian literature and philology) from UC Berkeley.
Ongoing Projects
I recently defended my dissertation, “The Case for Anthro-Culturalism: A Nietzschean Rejoinder to MacIntyre’s Critique of Modernity”, with distinction, which I am currently revising into a book. By means of an in-depth exegesis of the works of Alasdair MacIntyre and Friedrich Nietzsche, my dissertation argues that the fundamental pathology afflicting Modernity is not valuelessness (i.e., axiological crisis) but meaninglessness and will-lessness (i.e., an onto-practical crisis), the latter having profound cultural and political implications in Nietzsche’s view and prognosticating passivity and total nihilism for the West.
My latest project builds on my studies on Nietzsche, specifically the idea of “cultural realism”, and my interest in International Relations to explore the philosophical sources of realist foreign policy thinking. Through recovering the ideas of some seminal realist thinkers of the Western civilization, e.g. Thucydides and Nietzsche, particularly around ‘culture’ and ‘cultural blocs’, my study attempts to shed light on the future of international order in the post-hegemonic age. It argues that the emerging new world order would be one which is decisively ‘multi-polar’ and anchored on several autonomous great cultural poles – thus affirming “global cultural pluralism” and recognizing the necessity for diplomacy premised on mutual respect and open dialogue to foster global peace and manage conflict.
Areas of Interest
In addition to my specific interest in Modernity and Nietzsche, my general research and teaching interests include history of political thought, continental political philosophy, realism and its history, and comparative political theory with a special focus on Persian political thought. I aim to draw on these diverse paradigms of thought in responding to the concrete questions that arise in the areas of ‘culture and politics’ , ‘realism in foreign policy’, and the ‘liberal arts’.
Future Research
While still in embryonic stages, my prospective projects develop the theoretical findings of my dissertation in different ways. One is a comparative monograph, examining the role of the Zarathustra figure within Nietzsche’s writings in lieu of the political philosophy of the historical Zarathustra. The other, a book project tentatively titled “The Four Centuries of Decline”, is a critical study in the (Western) history of ideas, tracing the emergence of Modernity through the gradual transformation of liberalism in the West from its classical beginnings in the 17th century to its modern form in the 20th.
Email: Arta2587@hotmail.com Phone: +1-818-633-3617 Twitter: @artamoeini
