In this short and unassuming book Kamran Matin makes a radical attempt to rethink previous approaches to the historical sociology of modern Iran and the revolutionary transformation it experienced in the latter half of the twentieth century. In this journey he covers much ground, often at breakneck speed, with numerous historical and theoretical digressions. This leaves the book devoid of a moment where one is not provoked to rethink and/or defend one’s own assumptions and preconceptions derived from various well-established historiographies. It is also a work of immense intellectual ambition, leaping from the Safavids to the Constitutional Revolution and ideological interventions of ʿAli Sharīʿatī, from Leon Trotsky and Justin Rosenberg's critique of the realist paradigm in International Relations (IR), to the seminal “transition debates” between Ellen Wood, Robert Brenner and others over the emergence of capitalism in Europe, and the pugnacious debate between Perry Anderson/Tom Nairn and E. P. Thompson over Britain's “impure” bourgeois revolution in the pages of New Left Review.
The tremendous scope and regular digressions might not be to everyone's taste, particularly historians with a penchant for the granular, textured and studied sifting through the historical record, but Matin's endeavor and ambit are something else altogether. His predominantly methodological concern, encompassing both ontological and epistemological registers, is the very way we think about the nature of Iran's historical development and the normative conception of “modernity,” which invariably emerges therefrom. Because of the centrality of this exercise in methodological revisionism, and in particular its challenge to a large swathe of scholarly readings of pre-modern and modern Iranian history, this review will give focused attention to the how of Matin's “recasting” of Iranian modernity and the sophisticated conceptual architecture upon which it rests.
Given the macro-historical scope of this work and the challenge Matin poses to extant explanations and interpretations of the Iranian Revolution, it comes as little surprise that the primary target of his critique are those Eurocentric evaluations which have accompanied much of its reception. It does not come as news that the Iranian Revolution of 1978‒79 has often been depicted as an “enigma” and “exception” because of its apparent “failure” to conform to classical theories of modernity and revolution. And it is exactly by demonstrating the shortcomings of previous attempts to theorize social change and revolution in Iran that Matin hopes to dissolve this allegedly “unthinkable” figuration and strip away its Eurocentric imbrications—Eurocentric because of their predication on general categories which have been inductively reasoned out of Europe's own particular experience of modernity (p. 2) and then extrapolated to normatively evaluate and critique Iran's own revolutionary upheaval. In this sense, Matin's approach shares several affinities with that of Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe, while remaining distinct in a number of key respects.
As Matin points out, even the supposedly paradigmatic revolutions, the English and the French—namely those which comprise the locus classicus of long established theories of revolution and social change—remain hotly disputed and evaluated in terms of their deficiencies and failures to conform to the idealized models subsequently crafted by philosophers and social theorists. This was indeed one of E. P. Thompson’s erudite criticisms of Perry Anderson’s now seminal essay “Origins of the Present Crisis” (1964). Thus Matin's own reading of Iran's revolution in longue durée seeks to repudiate the four interrelated historical, normative, prognostic and stadial assumptions which posit modernity as a uniquely European phenomenon, strictly internal to Europe and western industrial capitalism and their development, birthing a socio-economic and politico-ideological order which then progressively diffused and spread to the rest of the world in successive centuries. Meanwhile, it was taken for granted that Europe's modernity held up a mirror to non-European peoples of their future in whose example historical necessity would compel them to follow.
Rather than recoiling into a nativist “jargon of authenticity” auto-authenticating its narrative through recourse to affective comportments, Matin contends that “eurocentrism can be decisively supplanted through a social theory that has international relations at its intellectual core” (p. 3). His conception of IR is a far cry from the Waltzian realism, which has imposingly dominated the field for decades. In lieu, under the decisive influence of Rosenberg's recasting of Trotsky's well-known, but poorly understood theory of “uneven and combined development” (Rosenberg supervised the thesis on which the book is based), Matin stipulates “the international” as an ontological category for the analysis of social change. Instead of exclusively attending to the internal and domestic, which ostensibly generate and propel revolutionary transformations, Matin argues that one must not confuse “the analytical distinction between the domestic and the international with their ontological separation” (p. 9). In order to avoid rehashing such misconceptions, it is necessary, he insists, to replace social theory's “ontologically singular conception of society with a plural one” (p. 11) where “the social” and “international” are held up and recognized as mutually constitutive (p. 21). While some of Karl Marx’s more (in)famous pronouncements (such as his statement in the first volume of Capital, “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future”), bear consideration for some of the more blatant instances of historical and stadial Eurocentrism in the Marxist tradition, it was one of Marx's more brilliant Russian disciples, Leon Trotsky, who was able to radically break with such internalist and teleological understandings of social change.
As Matin recalls, it is in his The History of the Russian Revolution that Trotsky claims that “unevenness [is] the most general law of the historic process” (p. 14), while combined development is “a drawing together of the different stages of the journey, a combin[ation] of separate steps, an amalgam[ation] of archaic with more contemporary forms” (p. 15). As Matin elaborates, “unevenness ipso facto conditions … developmental processes within and across the interacting societies. It always involves specific combinations of ‘external’ and ‘internal’ social, economic, political, institutional, cultural and ideational products; a process which renders the analytical distinction between the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ itself ontologically unstable” (p. 15). In this way, rather than advocating a singular and linear developmentalism, Trotsky furnished the analytical wherewithal for a multi-linear and ontologically plural conception of social development, insisting that “history does not repeat itself” (p. 16). Moreover, Matin, like Rosenberg, in contradistinction to other prominent advocates of the conception of “uneven and combined development” such as Neil Davidson, does not restrict its application to the advent of capitalism, extending it to the pre-capitalist past (p. 17). What is basic here is not capitalism per se, but rather its ontologically plural conception of the social. This point comes starkly into relief in Matin's analysis of tribal nomadism and state formation in pre-capitalist Iran in chapter 2.
This short review is unable to examine all of the historical case studies Matin brings to bear in this work, beginning as it does in the second chapter with the Safavid dynasty in 1501. The review will therefore focus on the author's exposition and analysis of the period of Iran's Constitutional Revolution, the early Pahlavi period (the reign of Reza Shah, 1925‒41), and the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and the tenure of Mohammad Mosaddeq (1951‒53). The chapter “An Iranian Janus: The Making of Revolutionary Islam,” an allusion to Tom Nairn's indictment of Marxism's failure to theorize nationalism, while certainly engaging, focuses more on ideology than the socio-political transformations unleashed during the revolution, the founding of the Islamic Republic and its aftermath, and consequently contains much that will be familiar to those acquainted with the extant secondary literature.
In his account of the Constitutional Revolution, Matin sets his sights primarily upon certain strands of Marxist historiography which frame the latter in terms of a “failed” or “incomplete” bourgeois revolution. According to this reading, the bourgeoisie was economically weak and consequently incapable of enacting its own “Jacobin” moment to overthrow the ancien régime in its entirety and thereby lay the foundations of Iran's belated industrialization (p. 48). As Matin observes, the Constitutional Revolution “imposed, for the first time ever, formal and institutionalized limits on the hitherto unchecked power of the monarchy through the establishment of a National Consultative Assembly … and the introduction of a charter of Fundamental Law” (p. 65), despite the absence of a strong, assertive bourgeoisie. On his view, the Constitutional Revolution was not the political outcome of Iran's “internally generated capitalist transformation,” but non-capitalist bazaar merchants and their allies' efforts to curtail the arbitrary power of the Qajar state, which had come under growing international pressure and become ever more reliant on strategies of defensive accumulation involving the penetration of foreign capital inside Iran (p. 67).
Matin then goes on to furnish an account of Reza Shah's “defensive modernization,” which for the most part is the standard one of an authoritarian and elite-led overhaul of the state apparatus, its institutions and means of coercion, as well as the legal and educational systems, and even sartorial practices, most notoriously the campaign of mandatory unveiling—a phenomenon which some scholars have referred to as “modernization without modernity.” Matin instead refers to the upshot of this process as “a modern nation-state without a nation,” in virtue of the fact that Reza Shah's prosecution of defensive modernization resulted in the conjunction of “an organizationally modern military-bureaucratic state to a materially premodern society” (p. 90), since in his own words the regime of Reza Shah, despite numerous reforms of import, “left the precapitalist economic fabric of Iran unblemished” (p. 89).
The evaluation of Mohammad Mosaddeq's legacy is more provocative, where Matin holds that “Mosaddeq’s active, conscious, and loyal constituency was a rather narrow social stratum of the modernist-nationalist intelligentsia which although politically vocal had a weak power-base of its own. Mosaddeq acted as a nationalist leader but had no nation behind him” (p. 95). While one might take issue with Matin's characterization of Mosaddeq's base of support as “narrow” or restricted predominantly to the intelligentsia, he makes a valid point when he argues that in the absence of major land reforms large swathes of the peasantry remained disconnected from national life and its controversies at the advent of the “global Cold War.” However, the often macro scale of Matin's analysis leads him to neglect the element of contingency and indeterminacy at specific historical conjunctures. For instance, he does not mention the fact that the coup very nearly failed and that numerous participants had even resigned themselves to its failure following the arrest of the commander of the Imperial Guard, Colonel Nimatullāh Nasīrī; or that the year previously, when Mosaddeq resigned after a dispute with the shah on 30 Tīr 1331, he was returned to power not merely through the protestations of the intelligentsia, but the huge crowds of people who poured into the capital's streets upon hearing the news, ending Qavām al-Saltaneh's final premiership as soon as it had started. Also, on the day preceding the coup Mosaddeq made the fateful decision to enjoin his supporters not to flood the streets in his support. A decision roundly criticized by Bīzhan Jazanī, a radical activist at the time and one of the historic founders of the Organization of the Iranian People's Fadāʾī Guerrillas.
Moreover, while his conjecture that the mobilization of the peasantry in the aftermath of a program of sweeping land reform might have made the difference, it is a counterfactual which remains inconclusive. For instance, the White Revolution (1963), its problems notwithstanding, provoked myriad uneven spatial and temporal socio-economic reverberations through rural‒urban migration and proletarianization (which Matin analyzes in the next chapter), while also harboring mixed political dividends for the regime of Mohammad Reza Pahlavī over a significantly longer duration of time. In fact, it seems Matin would concur that the indeterminate and unforeseeable outcomes of uneven and combined development would undermine the very possibility of such counterfactuals (as well as teleology), since the effects of such policies, without conflating the two distinct regimes, could hardly be straightforwardly translated into political capital with discrete outcomes by the government of the day. Even retroactive evaluations are no small or uncomplicated task. This is actually supported in Matin's own pointed observation that the shah squarely failed through his reforms to create a large and loyal class of capitalist farmers (p. 112). In short, there is no guarantee that Mosaddeq could have executed such reforms, supposing that they were under such conditions even actionable, or that they would have had the intended effect delineated by Matin.
The government of Sayyed Jaʿfar Pīshevarī had undertaken significant land reforms and had enfranchised women in the previous decade, while the rule of the Ferqeh-ye Demokrāt-e Azerbaijan was rapidly brought to a brutal end following the central government’s dispatch of the armed forces and as much of its popular support crumbled, in what might be described as a “bloody chapter in the central Iranian state's multiple unfolding drives of “internal colonization””. So again, on such a basis one could argue that Matin's surmise that Mosaddeq should have undertaken a fundamental restructuring of social property relations in the countryside, while fending off the unceasing machinations of two of the world's great powers, the UK and US, not to mention a hostile USSR, in the space of the two years preceding his eventual overthrow is misplaced.
Matin's intellectually rigorous and wide-ranging work should be read for its impressive attempt to think through Iran's long twentieth century in terms of the debates expatiated upon within “Political Marxism,” but above all the contemporary scholarship on “Uneven and Combined Development.” It poses a genuine and thoughtful challenge to the liberal-nationalist and Marxist historiography of modern Iran, both of which have often fallen foul of Eurocentrism and “internalism”—where Iran is viewed as either a self-enclosed unit of analysis with a discernible and unchanging set of building blocks, which account for its exceptional status (to the “norm” of western capitalist development), or as a perennially deficient and incomplete polity for its failure to match up to the paragons of revolutionary transformation, statehood and modernity. Matin manages to achieve this feat with great gusto, while eschewing the narrative of a eulogized “alternative modernity” (both in its nativist and postmodern guise) against “derivative” and “inauthentic” ideas and social practices originating from an alien “outside.” In fact, it is just these kinds of reified dichotomies which his thoughtful deployment of uneven and combined development sets out to problematize, rendering them “ontologically unstable” (p. 144).
