UCLA

Wallerstein is, understandably, a popular thinker in middle- and lower-income countries like Iran. Most of these places spent the past several generations strenuously cycling through a variety of governments, political ideologies and economic policies. A drawback of being a celebrity scholar is that complex ideas sketched across decades in books and articles are blurred into a Rorschach blot. The first step toward realizing the Leader's bold plan, an op-ed in the newspaper Donya-ye Eqtesad proclaimed, was strengthening the private sector. Mohammad Khoshchehreh, a former Ahmadinejad supporter turned sour, delighted in telling Fars that the Leader was not referring to 1980s wartime hangovers of autarky or self-sufficiency. The coordination required for such a scheme cannot rely on revolutionary rhetorical flourishes or a mercurial private sector. It demands not only organizational links between politicians, foreign investors and domestic brokers, but also the cooperation of newly educated Iranians themselves.