Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

• ali imani ¹
• abolfazl delavari ²

¹ PhD Student, Department of Political Science, Faculty of Law and Political Sciences, Allameh Tabataba’i University, Tehran, Iran.

² Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Faculty of Law and Political Sciences, Allameh Tabataba’i University, Tehran, Iran.

Abstract

Introduction
The Persian Constitutional Revolution, as the most significant expression of Iran’s encounter with political modernity, introduced transformative concepts such as popular sovereignty, rational governance, and individual rights into the public sphere and sought to institutionalize them within new political structures. However, despite the intellectual depth of the debates and the considerable sacrifices involved, the effort to establish a stable modern political order remained incomplete. The institutions that emerged from the revolution—most notably the parliament—failed to generate lasting stability and instead became arenas of crisis and structural deadlock. This study aimed to examine the political and intellectual processes through which political modernity was institutionalized during the Constitutional period and to explain why this project failed to produce a stable and coherent order. The research question is as follows: Why, despite the richness of intellectual debates, did the legal and institutional embodiment of these ideas—particularly in the Constitution and its amendment—result in a contradictory structure that generated recurring crises instead of an effective synthesis?
Literature Review
Research on the Iranian encounter with political modernity can be broadly divided into two major currents: (1) research on the thought or intellectual discourses and (2) research on the structure or institutional obstacles. Concerning the former, the significant studies include: The Iranian Constitutionalism (Ajoudani, 2003), Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization; Negotiating Modernity in Iran (Mirsepassi, 2000), and God and Juggernaut: Iran’s Intellectual Encounter With Modernity (Vahdat, 2002). This body of scholarship views the primary challenge of political modernity as epistemological. They argue that the foundational concepts of political modernity were reinterpreted through indigenous presuppositions and traditional epistemic frameworks. From this perspective, the resulting difficulties stemmed from epistemic incompatibility (Vahdat, 2002), the imported character of modern concepts (Ajoudani, 2003), and broader paradigmatic tensions (Mirsepassi, 2000).
The second group of studies is concerned with the structural and institutional aspects of Iranian modernity. The notable contributions are: “The Introduction and Expansion of the Components of Political Modernity During the Reign of Naser al‑Din Shah Qajar” (Ghaffari & Naseri, 2023), “Nationalism and Political Modernity in Iranian Constitutionalism” (Mirzaei, 2017), and “Seeking for Modern State in Iran: The Fate of Iranian Leviathan” (Gorji-Azandaryani & Shafiei-Sardasht, 2013). Adopting a sociological orientation, these studies emphasize structural (economic, social, and political) constraints. Research within this framework highlights issues such as divergences between Iran’s path of institutionalization and the Western historical experience (Ghaffari & Naseri, 2023), challenges related to crises of national identity (Mirzaei, 2016), and structural barriers to the formation of a modern bureaucratic state (Gorji-Azandaryani & Shafiei-Sardasht, 2013).
Despite the theoretical and historical contributions of the aforementioned studies, the existing literature suffers from several limitations. First, it remains divided by a methodological dichotomy between macro‑structural analysis and the history of ideas. Second, the systematic and organic link between epistemic contradictions and their institutional manifestation in the Constitution has not been sufficiently explored. Third, much of the scholarship has examined political modernity at a relatively superficial level—such as parliamentarism—while largely neglecting its foundational components, including rationality, individual rights, and popular sovereignty. The present study seeks to address this gap by positioning itself at the intersection of these debates and focusing specifically on these three foundational components.
Materials and Methods
As a qualitative inquiry, this study adopted an interpretive–historical framework seeking to understand political phenomena through a close analysis of the meanings, intentions, and interpretations of historical actors within their specific contexts. The conceptual framework rested on a fundamental analytical distinction between the universal dimension of modernity (i.e., its foundational and abstract principles) and the particular dimension (i.e., its concrete and contextualized manifestations in Iran). The study is based on the hypothesis that the contradictory synthesis and the resulting institutional instability should not be understood as a deviation from modernity; rather, they represent the particular form through which modernity was realized in the Iranian context.
To substantiate the above claim, the research adopted a two-level comparative analysis encompassing both thought and institution. At the level of thought, it undertook a qualitative and interpretive content analysis of the major works of four influential advocates of modern political thought: Mirza Malkam Khan, Mirza Abdul'Rahim Talibov, Mirza Yousuf Khan Mostashar al-Dowleh, and Mirza Fath-Ali Akhundzadeh. At the level of institution, it conducted a qualitative analysis and critical examination of key legal documents, including the full text of the 1906 Constitution and the 1907 Amendment known as Supplementary Fundamental Laws. Across both levels, the study traced three foundational components of political modernity as its core units of analysis: self-founding political rationality, individual political rights, and popular political sovereignty.
Results and Discussion
The findings revealed a systematic and profound gap between theoretical ideals (the level of thought) and institutional realities (the level of institution) during the Constitutional period across all central components of political modernity. Although intellectuals emphasized secular law as the embodiment of self-founding rationality, the Constitution—despite formally establishing a rational order through the separation of powers—immediately qualified and constrained this rationality by subordinating it to two traditional sources of authority: the transcendent rationality of Sharia (Article 2 of the Supplementary Fundamental Law) and monarchical authority.
Likewise, the ideal of individual political rights (citizenship) and equality were, at the level of institution, confined to a chapter on the Rights of the Nation. These rights were further problematized through two mechanisms: (1) the systematic conditioning of basic freedoms on conformity with religious provisions; and (2) the reduction of subjectivity from the autonomous individual to the nation, implicitly conceived as the Shia Muslim male.
Finally, with regard to popular sovereignty, the revolutionary principle that all state powers derive from the nation (Article 26) was effectively neutralized within the constitutional text itself through the incorporation of contradictory logics. This tension was most evident in the ambiguity surrounding the source of political legitimacy. Article 35, for instance, characterized the monarchy both as a trust deposited by the nation and as a divine gift. These findings suggest that the attempt to combine modern popular sovereignty with hereditary monarchy and religious sovereignty (as affirmed in Article 2) produced a structural deadlock within the constitutional political order.
According to the findings, political modernity in the Constitutional period did not appear as a failure in the face of tradition or as a deviation from an idealized Western model, but rather as a contradictory synthesis. This synthesis was neither pre-modern nor non-modern; it represented the particular form through which modernity was concretely realized in the Iranian context. Moreover, the source of institutional inefficiency lay in the gap between the theoretical level—the elites’ idealized conception of modernity—and the institutional level, where those ideas had to be translated into concrete structures. This gap was crystallized in the attempt to accommodate two incompatible epistemological foundations (i.e., self-founding rationality and traditional–religious authority) without resolving the fundamental tensions between them.
This contradictory synthesis and the structural tensions it generated manifested themselves at three foundational analytical levels. First, at the epistemological level, a tension emerged between self-founding rationalist and traditional authority. Second, at the teleological level, the project attempted to fuse a secular, this‑worldly political purpose with a transcendental, otherworldly one. Third, at the level of political subjectivity, the individual—as the bearer of inherent rights—was marginalized in favor of collectivist conceptions of the nation or the ummah. This approach treated individual rights not as fundamental and inalienable but as privileges granted by the state, thereby structurally constraining the emergence of an active and autonomous modern citizenry.
Conclusion
The Constitutional experience, as the founding moment of Iran’s political modernity, institutionalized not a coherent and homogeneous order, but one that was inherently heterogeneous and internally contradictory. Its legacy was not inefficiency in the sense of a failure to approximate an external model; rather, it was the permanent reproduction of crisis as the system’s own internal logic. Consequently, the failure to institutionalize political modernity during the Constitutional period was not simply the result of an unsuccessful adaptation of a uniform external model. Rather, it emerged from the concrete process through which modern principles were realized within Iran’s specific cultural and historical context. In this setting, instead of producing a stable synthesis, the epistemic tensions between modern rationality and traditional authority generated bifurcated institutions and an inherently contradictory order. This contradictory synthesis, as the institutional legacy of the Constitution, has remained active and determining, continuing to shape interpretive disputes, crises of legitimacy, and structural challenges in Iran’s contemporary sociopolitical sphere.

Keywords

• Political Modernity
• Constitutional Revolution
• Popular Sovereignty
• Political Rationality
• Individual Rights

Main Subjects

• Political Science