Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

• Mostafa KHaleghpour ¹
• mohammadbagher khorramshad ²
• shoja ahmadvand ²

¹ ph.d student of political thoughts. Allammeh tabatabaie university, tehran, iran.

² Professor, Department of law and Political Sciences, Allameh Tabataba’i University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Introduction
The second Pahlavi period can be understood, despite its many fluctuations, as an attempt to consolidate a particular relationship between political subjectivity and authority. In this historical period, following the establishment of Reza Shah’s rule, a political system centered on the ruling figure sought to consolidate, institutionalize, and naturalize itself, to inscribe its power onto the body of society through rituals and discursive practices, and to generate political legitimacy. The current study aimed to analyze the political strategies of the second Pahlavi period in establishing a specific form of political order, the modes of legitimation associated with it, and their consequences for shaping the relationship between the subject and political authority. The objective was to offer a different interpretation of the effort to consolidate a particular configuration of subjectivity and authority during the second Pahlavi period. Accordingly, the study tried to address the following questions: What structure of authority and subordinate subjectivity was embedded in the policies of the second Pahlavi dynasty? And what internal and external conflicts within those policies led to their gradual weakening and eventual decline?
Literature Review
In the article titled “Neo-Pastorship: A Critique of Governmental Rationality of Iran’s State,” Yahyavi (2017) argues that the rationality of the first and second Pahlavi states constituted a form of governmental rationality that emerged from the combination of traditional pastoralism with modern technologies of power such the police and bureaucracy. He conceptualizes this form of rule as neo-pastorship. In Yahyavi’s view, neo-pastorship enabled a particular political order and gave the state greater capacity and opportunity to intervene in society and inscribe its power on the body of society. In the book The Emergence of Iranian Nationalism: Race and the Politics of Dislocation, Zia-Ebrahimi (2016) interpreted the identity policies of the Pahlavi era as grounded in a form of racialized and archaic nationalism.
This kind of nationalism gained currency in Iran through the ideas of intellectuals such as Akhundzadeh and Kermani, and later through the thinkers of the Berlin Circle, before finding concrete historical expression in the identity policies during Reza Shah’s reign. He argues that these policies, referred to as politics of displacement, expanded the possibilities for political power to intervene in and manipulate society in the service of constructing a coherent and integrated identity.
Materials and Methods
The present study adopted a phenomenological methodology centered around the concept of life-world. Within this approach, politics and the political are understood through the consciousness of the I, the relationship between the I and the Other, and the course of everyday life. These three levels are actually interconnected within the life-world. Accordingly, a phenomenology of the world of politics cannot overlook the role of consciousness, interpersonal and intersubjective relations, or everyday life and the knowledge that arises from it—namely, common sense—in shaping how political events and realities are experienced and understood.
The use of this methodology is justified given the fact that, in contemporary Iranian history, the political has often been understood on the basis of essences external to the life-world (e.g., the authenticity of history, metaphysical truth, and authoritarian modernity) rather than through human relations themselves. Through the mediation of such extra-social essences, the ruling power turned both the life-world and society into the subject and object of its intervention and exercise of power.
From this perspective, the social sustains the political, and politics is not simply an expression of the ruler’s will, but rather a social and communicative process that derives its legitimacy and credibility from society.
Results and Discussion
The logic underlying the second Pahlavi period’s strategies for controlling subjectivity and subordinating society can be explained in terms of a kind of historical inversion, understood as the primacy of the political over the social. From a phenomenological perspective, the political is constituted in continuity with the social; in other words, the social grounds the political and gives it coherence. On this view, politics derives a secondary and dependent legitimacy from society, while the social serves as its basis and foundation. As a result, politics maintains an organic connection with the life-world and draws its legitimacy from society.
During the second Pahlavi period, however, this relationship between the political and the social was inverted due to the articulation of a particular narrative of Iran’s history and of the problem of backwardness. According to this narrative, Iran was a country of former glory that had gradually lost its greatness because of the influence and invasions of foreign powers. Iranians were also portrayed as racially distinct from their Semitic neighbors, as being of Aryan descent, and as more closely related to Westerners. Within this narrative, Iranian society was represented as backward and in need of purification from abnormal and uncivilized elements, while a path toward the gates of civilization was simultaneously laid out.
On the basis of this articulation of political power, the regime sought to consolidate and monopolize political subjectivity and agency, assigning itself the mission of guiding, controlling, and normalizing society. In doing so, it justified its legitimacy through a claim to truth and, on that basis, demanded obedience and loyalty from society.
Alongside the second Pahlavi’s strategies to construct a structure of authority tied to subordinate subjectivity, rhizomatic forms of resistance and struggle, as well as lines of escape from dominant power and the ruling ideological apparatuses, simultaneously emerged from within society itself. In such circumstances, Leftist and religious forces played the central role in shaping the rhizomes of resistance and lines of escape from ruling power within the body of society. This process contributed to the formation of a critical and revolutionary subject and ultimately culminated in the Islamic Revolution.
In the second Pahlavi period, the ruling power sought to reproduce itself within the body of society and to reinforce its political legitimacy through three discursive practices: invoking the past in order to regulate truth and generate legitimacy; constructing a discourse of Iranian exceptionalism; and attempting to produce subordinate subjectivity, depoliticize society, and monopolize political agency. Even as it sought to manage and channel the growing politicization of the Iranian subject, the ruling power aimed to reproduce itself within society and, through this process, to consolidate its political legitimacy.
Conclusion
This study examined the logic underlying the inversion that established the primacy of the political over the social in the second Pahlavi period. This inversion shaped the relationship between subjectivity and political authority. Relying on this reversal and the formulation of a particular narrative of Iranian history and its backwardness, political power sought to depoliticize the body of society and to consolidate and monopolize subjectivity and political agency in the person of the king and his loyal associates.

Keywords

• Subjectivity
• Authority
• Political Subjectivity
• Crisis of Authority
• Pahlavi II

Main Subjects

• Iranian Domestic Policy