Shahrokh Meskoob and His Vision Beyond Ideological Boundaries Shahrokh Meskoob (1924-2005) occupies a special, and in many ways unique, place among the Iranian intellectuals of his generation. While the principal focus of his work was the study of Persian literary traditions, language, and cultural identity, he was also preoccupied with questions about Iran’s encounter with the West and modernity, the place of ethics in politics, and various aspects of Iran’s political culture. He explored these questions with candor, a keen awareness of Iran’s cultural traditions, and free from the ideological scaffolds that dominated the discourses of Iranian intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s. This paper presents an analysis of Meskoob’s initial attraction to the Tudeh Party’s communist ideology, his abandonment of the party in the mid-1950s after several years of active membership and later imprisonment; his aversion to the popular anti-Western discourse of “Westoxification” (gharbzadegi) in prerevolutionary Iran, and finally his reflections on the Islamic Revolution.