"Drawing on in-depth elite interviews and documents, this book investigates how and why the Iranian reformists used the language and concept of civil society to enhance the reformists' positions of power. Mohebi focuses especially on reformist public intellectuals as agents of change, especially effective because of the role they played in introducing new ideas to a wider constituency, and examines how different reformist intellectuals used civil society to craft their vision of Iran's socio-political future. Mohebi also examines how conservative figures with different underlying values and political agendas appropriated civil society for their own ends. The book argues that, although the concept of civil society may be deployed to serve conflicting objectives, its lasting legacy is pluralism and an opening up of the public sphere"--