I was scrolling through Instagram stories when I came across a post by a man I knew, though not closely. Since the recent war and the growing fear that Donald Trump might destroy Iran, his attitude toward the Islamic Republic seemed to have changed. He had begun to defend the government, or at least to speak as though its survival had become inseparable from the survival of the country. In the story, he referred to remarks attributed to Marco Rubio about Western history, the Persians, Xerxes, and the burning of Athens. His response was defiant: Iran could do it a thousand times again; the Islamic Republic knew what it was doing, and it was alert to the dangers surrounding it. I paused over the story, not because I could confidently infer everything this man believed, but because the movement in his reasoning seemed familiar. A fear directed toward the possible destruction of a country had become a reason to defend the institution governing it. At what point does the defense of Iran become indistinguishable from the defense of the Islamic Republic? And what kind of historical and political arrangement makes this confusion possible?

The question is not whether people have the right to fear an attack on their country, nor whether the threat of foreign violence can temporarily alter their political priorities. Such reactions are understandable, and solidarity in a time of danger does not necessarily imply ideological agreement with a government. A person may oppose a state’s domestic practices and still fear that its destruction would bring devastation to the society over which it rules. The more difficult question concerns the conditions under which this distinction becomes hard to maintain. How does a government come to occupy so much of the symbolic space of a nation that resistance to the government can appear to be resistance to the nation itself, while criticism of the government by outsiders can be experienced as an insult to a people, their history, and their dignity?

I call the structure that emerges from this difficulty the absurdism of international relations. By absurdism, I do not mean that international politics is simply irrational, hypocritical, or governed by foolish decisions. Nor do I mean that the behavior of foreign governments can be explained entirely by the internal arrangements of the countries they address. States pursue their own interests, select convenient historical narratives, and frequently reduce complex societies to simplified images. Their descriptions of other nations may be strategic, inaccurate, or openly hostile. The absurdity I have in mind arises from the interaction between such external representations and the internal restrictions that determine who can speak for a country, how its history can be interpreted, and which institutions are permitted to present its collective identity to the world.

A government does not become identical to a nation simply because it exercises power over the nation’s territory. Yet it may acquire an overwhelming advantage in representing that nation. When independent media, autonomous associations, and competing public interpretations are restricted, the government’s voice becomes disproportionately visible. Its actions, declarations, and conflicts are then more likely to stand in for the country as a whole. The world encounters the state where it might otherwise encounter a plurality of citizens, histories, institutions, and arguments. The resulting image is never the whole country, but it can become the image through which the country is most readily recognized.

This imbalance has consequences in both directions. From outside, the government may be treated as the most convenient expression of the society it governs. From within, citizens may find that judgments directed at the government return to them as judgments about their own historical identity. The government’s international standing and the nation’s dignity become entangled, even when the citizens concerned have little influence over the decisions that produce that standing. A person who feels that the country is being humiliated may therefore defend the state not because every action of the state is acceptable, but because the state has come to occupy the place where the country is publicly visible.

The cycle becomes self-reinforcing. Restrictions on independent representation make the government more prominent as the representative of the nation. That prominence allows the government’s international conflicts to be experienced as national conflicts. The resulting sense of collective injury can encourage citizens to rally around the state, including citizens who might otherwise question its authority. Such reactions, in turn, strengthen the state’s claim to embody the nation. The institution that limits the society’s ability to represent itself may thus acquire further authority by presenting itself as the necessary defender of that same society.

This is the central absurdity: people may defend their capacity to belong to a historical community through an institution that restricts their capacity to interpret and represent that community independently. Their attachment to the country is real, but the available public language for expressing that attachment has been narrowed. The state does not need to persuade every citizen that it is just or legitimate. It may be enough for it to appear, under external pressure, as the only available barrier between the country and its humiliation or destruction.

Yet this arrangement contains a contradiction. A state may monopolize the public representation of a nation for a considerable time, but it cannot thereby become the complete substance of that nation. The histories, languages, memories, customs, and disagreements of a society exceed the institutions that claim to embody them. The more thoroughly a government identifies its own authority with the country as a whole, the more difficult it may become for the country’s independent historical plurality to appear. What is presented as national unity can then conceal a representational poverty: the nation is made visible, but only through a narrow and compulsory frame.

The absence of independent historical and cultural representation matters here. A society needs ways to tell its own story that are neither merely extensions of the state nor responses dictated by the hostility of foreign powers. It needs institutions capable of presenting the complexity of its past, distinguishing a government from the people it governs, and allowing historical inheritance to be interpreted without requiring political obedience. Where these possibilities are weak, the country may appear abroad primarily through the conduct of its rulers and the conflicts those rulers enter. Its people are left to defend an identity that they have had too few opportunities to represent in their own terms.

This is where the argument meets a sentence associated with Mirza Fath-Ali Akhundzadeh: “The people should be free within their country and respected outside it” (Maktubat-e Kamal al-Dawla, pp. 21–22 — in English, The Letters of Kamal al-Dawla). The sentence joins two conditions that are often treated separately. Freedom within a country concerns the relation between people and power; respect outside it concerns the country’s standing in the wider world. But these conditions are not independent. A society’s ability to appear abroad as something more than the conduct of its government depends, at least in part, on the freedom of its members to speak, organize, remember, criticize, and represent themselves at home.

Internal freedom cannot guarantee external respect. Other states may remain hostile, and international recognition is often shaped by interests that have little to do with a society’s internal openness. Nor does domestic repression explain every hostile account of Iran or every conflict involving the Islamic Republic. The more limited and defensible claim is that a society deprived of independent means of representation has fewer ways to contest the image produced by its rulers or imposed upon it from outside. Freedom at home does not purchase respect abroad, but it enlarges the capacity to respond to disrespect without making the government’s authority the sole measure of national dignity.

Akhundzadeh’s historical importance lies here not in his having anticipated every element of a contemporary political theory, but in the force of the relationship he draws between domestic freedom and external standing. His criticism of arbitrary rule and religious authority belongs to a particular intellectual and historical context; it should not be collapsed into the present argument as though his thought and today’s concepts were identical. Nevertheless, his formulation opens a question that remains urgent: can a people be represented with dignity abroad when their ability to speak and act freely at home is persistently restricted?

In another passage, Akhundzadeh describes revolution as a condition in which people, exhausted by the unlawful conduct of a despotic ruler, unite to remove him and establish laws for their own comfort and happiness; he also describes resistance to clerical authority and inherited religious beliefs, followed by the adoption of a new order guided by reason (Maktubat-e Kamal al-Dawla, p. 15). The two movements are related, but they are not the same. One concerns the transformation of arbitrary power into law established for the people’s welfare. The other concerns the authority of religious belief and clerical interpretation over the ordering of collective life. Together, they suggest that freedom requires more than replacing one ruler with another. It also requires examining the sources of authority that determine what people may think, say, and make of their shared world.

These passages should not be treated as a ready-made answer to contemporary problems. Their value for the present essay is more modest: they help reveal why the freedom to organize a society’s internal life and the freedom to represent its identity are connected. If citizens cannot contest the institutions that speak in their name, they cannot fully separate their own historical belonging from the authority of those institutions. The resulting identification is not necessarily a matter of ignorance or bad faith. It may be a consequence of the limited forms through which public identity is permitted to appear.

The question, then, is not simply how to restore a supposedly authentic national image. No single account of a country can be final, and no independent media or cultural institution can eliminate disagreement. The point is to make disagreement possible without treating it as disloyalty. A nation becomes more capable of representing itself when its history can be narrated from multiple positions, when the actions of its government can be criticized without condemning its people, and when citizens can distinguish loyalty to a country from obedience to the institution that currently governs it. National dignity becomes less dependent on the reputation of a particular regime when the nation has more than one public voice.

This distinction leads to a second concept, which I call virtual liberalism. I use “virtual” neither to mean imaginary nor to suggest that liberalism exists only in a digital or unreal space. The term expresses a different proposition: liberalism is not a destination toward which history is moving, nor a final political form that history will eventually reach and leave behind as complete. It is an enduring possibility within historical life, continually redefined through the conflicts and relationships that make freedom a question in the first place.

Liberalism is already an established name for a family of commitments concerning individual freedom and the limits of power over the individual. My use of the term does not abandon that reference. It begins from it, while refusing to confine liberalism to one definitive institutional arrangement, one cultural expression, or one completed historical identity. The conditions under which freedom must be defended change. The forms taken by authority change; so do the relations between individuals, families, religious communities, inherited traditions, public institutions, and the law. Liberalism remains historically alive not because it repeats an identical formula, but because the meaning and realization of individual freedom must be reconsidered in relation to these changing conditions.

The virtual, in this sense, is not an unreal liberalism waiting to become real. It is the continuing possibility of liberalism taking form differently without being exhausted by any one of its forms. A particular legal system may embody certain freedoms while failing to protect others. A political arrangement may expand individual choice in one domain and restrict it in another. A society may inherit institutions once associated with emancipation and later discover that they have become instruments of exclusion. None of these possibilities can be resolved by declaring that liberalism has finally arrived. The question of freedom reappears within the historical arrangements that claim to have answered it.

This account is deliberately non-teleological. History does not necessarily move toward liberalism, and there is no guarantee that the possibility of freedom will prevail. Political societies can close themselves to pluralism, abandon protections they once maintained, or use the language of freedom to conceal new forms of domination. Calling liberalism virtual does not make every arrangement liberal or permit the term to mean whatever a particular period wants it to mean. Individual freedom and limits on coercive power remain necessary points of reference. What changes is how these commitments are interpreted, contested, and institutionally realized.

Virtual liberalism is therefore neither a fixed endpoint nor an unlimited collection of unrelated models. It names the historical persistence of a question: how can individuals exercise freedom within a shared world whose laws, beliefs, and institutions are inherited rather than chosen anew by each generation? The answer cannot be supplied once and for all. Freedom is not secured simply by declaring a doctrine correct, because the social arrangements through which freedom is exercised can themselves become sources of compulsion. The work of liberalism, in this sense, lies partly in its capacity to examine and revise the conditions under which its own central commitment can be sustained.

If liberalism remains a historical possibility rather than a final destination, then tradition must also be approached without either freezing it into an untouchable inheritance or treating it as an obstacle to be removed. This is the problem addressed by what I call legal Maximinimalism. The term refers to a principle for organizing the relationship between law and the plurality of meanings carried by tradition. Its purpose is to preserve the greatest possible space for inherited practices and interpretations while minimizing the extent to which any one interpretation is made compulsory through law.

Tradition is not a single proposition passed intact from one generation to the next. It is a dense field of rituals, stories, moral expectations, family relations, aesthetic forms, public customs, memories, prohibitions, and competing accounts of what a community has been. These elements do not remain meaningful in isolation. Their significance depends on the relations among them and on the circumstances in which they are practiced, remembered, or challenged. A tradition can continue while its meanings change; it can also preserve familiar forms while the relationships that once sustained them are transformed.

A Persian rug offers a useful analogy. Its design may contain numerous motifs, colors, borders, repetitions, and variations. The pattern emerges through their relations, not from the isolated meaning of a single thread. To preserve the rug does not require every motif to be interpreted identically by every observer, nor does it require each thread to be detached from the design. Its continuity depends on a structured plurality: the parts remain related, but their relations cannot be reduced to one element alone.

Tradition is similarly capable of continuity without complete uniformity. Different generations may reinterpret a ritual; individuals may retain a cultural practice while rejecting the authority once used to justify it; a family may preserve a custom while changing the roles through which it is enacted. These changes do not necessarily erase tradition. They may be among the ways in which tradition remains part of living history rather than becoming a museum of compulsory meanings.

Legal Maximinimalism asks what law should do in the face of this plurality. It does not demand the maximal preservation of every inherited practice, since some practices may violate the equal freedom or basic rights of those subject to them. Nor does it call for the minimization of law as such. Law may be necessary to protect individuals from coercion, including coercion exercised in the name of tradition. The principle instead seeks to minimize the legal authority of any single interpretation over the full field of inherited life, while maximizing the room for different interpretations to coexist, develop, and be challenged.

The distinction matters because law does more than prohibit or permit conduct. When it declares one interpretation of a tradition compulsory for everyone, it can turn a historically situated understanding into an official and seemingly timeless truth. Alternative interpretations may then become not merely unpopular but unlawful, and the capacity of a society to reinterpret its inheritance is narrowed. A tradition that might otherwise contain disagreement becomes identified with the authority that enforces one version of it.

A Maximinimalist legal order would not decide in advance what every religious, cultural, or familial practice must mean. It would establish protections for individual freedom and equal standing, then leave the broadest possible space for people to sustain, revise, dispute, or decline inherited practices within those limits. The law’s task would be to protect the conditions under which tradition can remain plural, rather than to become the final interpreter of its meaning. In this way, the preservation of tradition and the protection of freedom need not be understood as opposing aims. What must be limited is not the existence of inherited meanings, but the power to impose one of them as the compulsory meaning of a whole society.

This brings us to soft secularism. It is not simply a milder version of the separation of religious and political institutions, nor is it a project of subtracting religion from public life. It is an attempt to redefine the relationships among religion, law, the state, public morality, and social life so that no single religious interpretation can claim compulsory authority over everyone. Religion may remain visible and consequential in public life, but its presence need not be secured through the state’s power to enforce a particular doctrine.

The distinction between public presence and legal compulsion is essential. Religion can inform people’s moral judgments, sustain communities, shape rituals, inspire art, and participate in public debate without becoming the exclusive source of law for the entire population. Equally, the state can refrain from enforcing a religious interpretation without demanding that citizens abandon their beliefs or conceal their religious lives. Soft secularism seeks to loosen the compulsory bond between religious authority and state power while preserving the freedom of religious and nonreligious people to participate in a shared society.

This approach does not presume that religion will become more tolerant, more vibrant, or less influential once its privileged legal position is limited. Religious communities may continue to disagree sharply, and some may advocate political arrangements that others reject. Secular institutions cannot guarantee the moral outcome of those disagreements. Their purpose is more restrained: to protect the conditions under which disagreement does not automatically become a contest for the power to impose one comprehensive doctrine on all.

Soft secularism therefore belongs to the same family of concerns as legal Maximinimalism. If tradition is a plurality of inherited meanings, the law should not freeze one of those meanings into a compulsory public identity. If individual freedom must be repeatedly reconsidered under changing historical conditions, no religious or secular doctrine should be exempt from scrutiny simply because it claims final authority. The state should protect the space in which people can live with, reinterpret, or dissent from their inheritance, rather than determine in advance what that inheritance must mean.

In this framework, a national government belongs to its citizens; the nation does not belong to the government. The government may administer institutions, make laws, and represent the country in international affairs, but it cannot legitimately claim that its own ideology exhausts the country’s historical identity. Nor should citizens have to demonstrate political obedience to prove that they care about their country. Their attachment may be expressed through criticism, historical research, cultural work, religious practice, secular conviction, or the effort to create institutions that allow other people to speak freely as well.

This distinction also matters when considering those who support a government whose practices they may not fully endorse. Political attachment is rarely produced by a single belief. It may arise from family history, social belonging, fear of instability, material dependence, distrust of alternatives, religious conviction, habit, or a sincere judgment about external threats. Some people may support a government actively; others may defend it only under particular circumstances. It would be a mistake to treat all such people as interchangeable agents of repression, just as it would be a mistake to assume that their motives exempt particular actions from scrutiny.

A society seeking a freer political order must be able to distinguish between an individual’s beliefs, their social attachments, and their concrete participation in coercive acts. Accountability should depend on evidence and specific conduct, not on a blanket judgment about everyone who once supported, tolerated, or feared the alternatives to a governing institution. If freedom is to become a durable practice rather than a temporary victory, it must leave room for people to reconsider their commitments, change their political habits, and enter public life without being permanently defined by their previous affiliations.

This is not a promise of reconciliation without conflict. Institutions may need to be transformed, abuses investigated, and rights protected against those who would undermine them. But a political transition that simply reverses the direction of compulsion risks reproducing the very logic it seeks to overcome. The aim cannot be to replace one compulsory identity with another. It must be to create conditions in which no government, religious authority, or political majority can claim exclusive ownership of the nation’s voice.

The concepts developed here are connected, but their connection is not a chain of inevitable deductions. The absurdism of international relations describes a cycle in which restricted self-representation can turn a government’s international standing into a proxy for national dignity. Virtual liberalism identifies freedom as an enduring historical possibility that must be redefined rather than treated as a destination already reached. Legal Maximinimalism offers one way to preserve the plurality of inherited meanings while limiting their compulsory legal enforcement. Soft secularism applies this concern to the relationship between religious life and state power. Each concept addresses a different aspect of the same problem: how can a society remain historically continuous without surrendering its capacity for freedom, disagreement, and self-representation?

The answer cannot be a final institutional formula. Any arrangement may become rigid, and any vocabulary of freedom may be turned into an instrument of exclusion. The significance of these concepts lies instead in the questions they keep open. Can a nation be distinguished from the government that claims to embody it? Can tradition remain meaningful without becoming compulsory? Can religion participate in public life without monopolizing law? Can liberalism preserve its commitment to individual freedom without pretending that history has completed its work?

The Instagram story with which I began does not settle these questions, and one person’s response to the fear of war cannot stand as evidence of an entire society’s political condition. Its significance is more limited and more revealing: it shows how easily the defense of a country can become entangled with the defense of the institution that speaks most loudly in its name. When people have too few independent ways to express their historical belonging, the government’s voice can become difficult to separate from their own. The remedy is not to demand that they care less about their country, nor to ask them to accept the judgments of foreign powers as authoritative. It is to widen the space in which they can represent their country without having to represent its rulers.

Akhundzadeh’s sentence returns here with a different weight. To be free within one’s country and respected outside it are not two unrelated aspirations. Internal freedom gives a society more ways to appear in the world than through the conduct of its government. It enables people to tell their history, contest inherited authority, and distinguish their collective life from the claims of any institution that seeks to monopolize it. External respect remains uncertain, because the world is neither impartial nor governed by a single standard. But a country whose people can speak in many voices is less completely dependent on the voice of the state.

Perhaps the deepest political question is therefore not how a nation can secure one final and uncontested representation of itself. No such representation is possible for a living society. The question is whether it can develop the freedom to represent itself repeatedly, differently, and without fear that disagreement will be treated as betrayal. If history does not lead inevitably to liberalism, then freedom cannot be entrusted to history’s supposed destination. It must remain an open possibility within historical life, protected and redefined through the institutions people build, the traditions they reinterpret, and the limits they place on power. A nation begins to belong more fully to its people when they no longer have to defend the authority that governs them in order to defend the history they share.