Background
A brief review of the Iranian modern history demonstrates that at least three strong events (the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, the Oil Nationalization Movement (henceforth, the ONM), the Islamic Revolution of 1979) shaped the trends and patterns of socio-economic development and were associated with large-scale confrontations between the forces inside and outside the country, creating a history of instability, upheaval, and socio-political violence alongside generating large-scale restructuring of socio-economic institutions and unstoppable waves of migration.
Many commentators and observers appear to be puzzled by the seemingly unending and unpredictable waves of incessant turbulence in the Iranian society, never settling down in the form of a steady social order based on the establishment of a set of stable institutional arrangements and steady and predictable positions in terms of internal socio-economic policies and external foreign policies. The Iranian society seems to be in a state of perpetual flux and permanent turmoil. The sense of despair, disillusionment, and bewilderment appears to be equally shared between the Iranians and non-Iranians alike.
Aims, Objectives and Questions
This study aims to explore, explicate, and critically analyse the enigma of bitter experience of socio-economic development in the modern history of Iran. In other words, this work purports to conduct a case study on the violent experience of socio-economic development in Iran by offering a novel model for the analysis of the Iranian enigma based on an interdisciplinary approach at the intersection of philosophy, psychoanalysis, economics, and politics. This study basically aims to develop a grounded theoretical model to be tailored to the social reality of contemporary Iran and to be specifically applied to the various events in the Iranian modern history to demonstrate its potency in explicating the root causes of the turbulent and violent experiences of socio-economic development.
Within the identified aims and objectives, the main question triggering this work is: âwhat are the root causes of the bitter experience of socio-economic underdevelopment and the problematic of wealth creation in the modern history of Iran?â Or simply put, why Iranians have been asking themselves the following question in the last 200 years: âwhy has Iran not joined the league of advanced economies?â
In our quest for answers, we noticed that the three aforementioned strong events of the modern Iranian history demonstrate various failed attempts to achieve sustainable socio-economic development and to incorporate modernity. Iranians, consequently, seem to have been asking themselves the following set of questions (see Tavakoli-Targhi 2001; Matin-Asgari 2004). Why does it seem that so many attempts to achieve sustainable levels of wealth creation, socio-political stability, and a thriving society happy in its own skin have not been successful? What was the set of discursive and non-discursive practices in currency and in circulation in these three situations on the issue of the roots of Iranian socio-economic ailments and what was deemed to be the way forward? What was the interplay of texts and contexts in the sense that which texts and in what exact forms were evoked to analyse the roots of the socio-economic malaise and how they were used to entice actions and to inform policies?
Do these three movements and revolutions represent a linear progression towards achieving a sustainable level of socio-economic development or do they manifest a chaotic history with no social destination and as such manifesting a cyclical voyage? How can we make judgement? What were the achievements and shortcomings of these three strong events? Can they tell us something about the patterns and trends repeating themselves throughout the modern history of Iran or are Iranians facing different issues at different times and consequently must acknowledge that there are no unifying themes connecting them together? Is there any accumulation of knowledge on the past experiences or are the same experiences being reproduced in different shapes and forms?
The undoubtable fact of the Iranian modern history seems to revolve around the observation that Iranians have been severely unhappy, resentful, and discontent with their own modern history and with their own experiences of socio-economic development (Saniâ al-Dowleh 1907/1984; Makarem Shirazi 1961; Mansouri-Zeyni and Sami 2014; Jafarian 2017). In the last 200 years, Iranians diagnosed their country as severely diseased (Tavakoli-Targhi 2001: 124), schizophrenic (Shayegan 1997; Tavakoli-Targhi 2009: 5), or in a state of historical decline or disintegration (Tabatabai 2001). Forough Farrokhzad, the influential Iranian poet, calls Iran âa shack full of death, depravity and absurdityâ (Jafari 2005: 363â364). Katouzian (2010: 17) dubs Iran as âthe pick-axe society (jameâeh-ye kolangi)â and the Shah famously loved Iran but hated its people. Taqizadeh, one of the leading constitutionalists and modernist intellectuals of modern Iran, expressed his contempt for the people of Iran for their spinelessness (Katouzian 2012: 203). The books addressing the question of âwhy are we backward?â have been among the bestsellers in Iran (Matin-Asgari 2004), indicating the persistent criticality of the question of backwardness for the Iranian dasein. As such the last 200 years of Iranian experiences of socio-economic underdevelopment has been an issue for the Iranians and non-Iranians alike.
Iranians experienced the manifestations of this permanent crisis in the military defeats, political instability, economic stagnation, and the critical states of public services in health, education, transportation, bureaucracy, and national security (intelligence system, police, and army). Iran has been an earthquake nation geo-politically as Japan has been geo-physically. As a result, Iran has been mired in various forms of identity politics and its associated politics of resentment in the last two centuries. As Pieterse (2010: 132; see also Szirmai 2015: 10) puts it, this sense of backwardness is constituted by the two notions of âawareness of a technology and development gap with the westâ and the âattempts to catch upâ. Even in the hypothetical case where we end up denying Iranâs backwardness, we must address the question of how and why the Iranians so frequently in their modern history came to see themselves as backward.
As such, the main task of this research is to take the questions originating from their sense of resentment seriously and to explore them through the tools, concepts, and insights offered by hermeneutics of understanding (the art and science of listening to the historical actors) and hermeneutics of suspicion (causal analysis and complex system analysis to uncover the patterns and mechanisms emerging out of unintended consequences of the interactions between various social actors). In this study we come to show that the Iranians have cared for all three forms of Habermasian rationalities in the last 200 years. The development gap is part of âthe instrumental rationalityâ, which needs to be complemented with concerns over âthe communicative rationalityâ (the sense of communal belonging) and âthe emancipative rationalityâ (spiritual development) as well (see the following chapters) alongside the concerns over how to harmonize them, which has instigated âthe crisis of legitimacyâ (Arjomand 1988; Bakhash 1995; Jahanbegloo 2010) for all forms of socio-political orders in the modern history of Iran.
Many commentators implicitly or explicitly maintain that Iranian peopleâs questions and problems are basically the same as what they had been at the age of the Constitutional Revolution (see Ehteshami 2017; Jafarian 2017; Hunter 2014; Malek-Ahmadi 2003; Ajodani 2003, among others). Does this mean that Iranians are moving in a circular fashion and have travelled full circle during a century of bitter and violent social experimentations? If we define socio-economic development in terms of sustainability, that is, the concrete capacity of a society to repair and modernize itself in the face of cultural, social, and economic crises and shocks, and in its ability to establish stable institutions of conflict resolution away from perpetual violence, does Iranian experience meet these criteria or not?1
This research, hence, aims to develop and propose a theoretical model constituting persuasive responses for these fundamental questions. The rest of this chapter briefly maps the set of concepts deployed in the rest of this study.
Conceptualizing the Problem: The Proposed Model
At the core of the proposed model in this study is the notion of tragedy of confusion emanating from the state of belated inbetweenness2 with its associated confused preference structure. Iranians have been captivated by the three rival regimes of truth and identity markers of Islam, Persianism (the idea of pre-Islamic Iran), and the Western modernity. In the context of belatedness (being late to modernity and being in the state of catching-up3), these t...