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For a long time intellectuals in Iran have been at the crossroads of two distinct sources of influence: Western thought and Shiite thought. These two traditions began to exert their contradictory influence from the end of the 19th century onwards. The Islamic revolution was the result of a social movement and an intellectual trend, resulting in the renewal of Islamic thought exposed to Western Marxist and Third-worldist ideas. Since then, three generations of intellectuals have been active. There has been a divergent new intellectual trend since the beginning of the 1990s in which the second and the third generations question the legitimacy of the radical Islamic thought of the first generation in the name of civil society and a tolerant Islam. The main topic of this article is the interaction between these three generations and the advent of a new group, made up of journalists who belong to the second and third generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]