Occidental Studies

Abstract "Globalization" has transformed many of the key traditional concepts of politics. One of these concepts is "democracy". Given the changes that have taken place in the age of globalization, Held and Habermas have tried to replace the models of "cosmopolitan democracy" and "Deliberative democracy" with liberal democracy respectively. The purpose of this paper is to show the efforts of Habermas and Held to replace their proposed model with the model of liberal democracy. Habermas describes his proposed model of democracy by relying on the three systems of "government", "economy" and "the lifeword". But Held does this by rebuilding the current world order. The findings of this article indicate that the efforts of both thinkers to achieve the desired goal have not been successful. The main reason for this failure is the conservatism of Held's intellectual structure, and consequently desire to maintain the status quo on the one hand, and Habermas' overly optimistic view of consensus and rationalism on the other. This article is descriptive-analytical in terms of method and content, and the required data has been obtained through library methods.

Abstract Islamic Civilization is a subject with great importance, not only concerned with the identity of the Islamic world but also can be an effective factor in establishing it in the time when the Western Civilization beholds nothing equal to itself. But finding ups and downs occurred in the Western Civilization and how important this ups and downs is, are problems that can be a subject for research. Besides, in the discussion of the scientific and social developments in the human history, usually three periods are considered as criterions, that are Hellenic Ages, Middle Ages, and New Age; but this historical division includes mostly the scientific and social history of Europe and the West. This article discusses scientifically how to consider certain periods for the Islamic Civilization as well as its ups and downs during five great historical changes from various points of view. Two of these five periods studied in this article are the decadence and three of them are the exaltation of the Islamic civilization. Now we are in the third period of exaltation and the fifth step of development of the Islamic civilization. It can be a multilateral critical and comparative look at the history and development of the Islamic Civilization as compared with those of the Western Civilization.