Document Type : Research Paper
Authors
1 Student
2 Assistant Professor of Political Science, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran
Abstract
Introduction
Scholarship on the Pahlavi state has predominantly framed it either as an authoritarian modernizing regime imposing transformation from above or as a paradigmatic rentier state shaped by oil revenues. While these perspectives have generated valuable insights, they share a foundational analytical limitation: the state is treated either as an exogenous agent acting upon society or as an epiphenomenon of economic structures. Such approaches obscure the historical processes through which the state itself becomes socially constituted through economic transformation and class restructuring.
This article challenges this dichotomy by conceptualizing the state as a historically situated social formation whose economic interventions actively participate in the reorganization of social stratification. Rather than asking how the economy affected the state in a linear manner, the study interrogates how economic transformation reconfigured the field of state action and gradually altered the social foundations of state power. The core problem addressed here is thus the absence of a processual explanation linking economic change, class formation, and the transformation of state nature in modern Iran.
Research Question, Hypothesis, and Objective
The central research question is: How did transformations in Iran’s economic structure during the Pahlavi period reshape social stratification, and through what mechanisms did this restructuring contribute to the transformation of the social nature of the state?
The main hypothesis argues that the transition from a land-based political economy to a state-centered, oil-fueled economic structure generated new, institutionally mediated social strata whose reproduction depended on proximity to the state. This transformation weakened traditional social coalitions while simultaneously preventing the emergence of an autonomous bourgeois or popular base, thereby producing a bureaucratic and state-centered polity with limited social embeddedness.
The objective of the study is to reconstruct the causal mechanisms through which economic change altered class configurations and, in turn, transformed the state from a coalition-dependent entity into a structurally autonomous yet socially fragile institution.
Literature Review
Existing scholarship on the Pahlavi state has primarily examined state transformation through either authoritarian modernization frameworks or rentier state theories, emphasizing oil revenues and political centralization. While these studies have provided valuable insights into institutional change and state autonomy, they often treat social stratification as a secondary or derivative outcome. More recent works in political economy and historical sociology have highlighted the importance of class formation and bureaucratic expansion, yet they rarely reconstruct the causal processes linking economic transformation, social stratification, and the evolving social nature of the state. This study addresses this gap by offering a processual and mechanism-based analysis of state transformation in Iran.
Theoretical Framework and Research Method
The analysis draws on a theoretically integrated framework combining Erik Olin Wright’s relational class analysis with Anthony Giddens’s theory of structuration. Wright’s conceptualization of class as a relational and organizational phenomenon allows for the identification of contradictory class locations produced by bureaucratic expansion, state employment, and administrative control over resources. These positions cannot be captured by classical dichotomies of capital and labor but are crucial for understanding state-centered social formations.
Giddens’s structuration theory provides the complementary insight that state institutions are both constrained by existing social structures and simultaneously reproduce or transform those structures through routinized practices. This duality enables an analysis of the state not merely as a reflection of class relations but as an arena in which economic power, administrative capacity, and social positioning are continuously reconstituted.
Methodologically, the study employs process tracing as a within-case, qualitative strategy. By reconstructing temporally ordered sequences of economic reforms, institutional changes, and social outcomes, the research identifies the causal pathways linking shifts in economic structure to transformations in social stratification and state character. This approach allows for opening the “black box” between economic change and political outcomes, avoiding both economic determinism and institutional reductionism.
Research Findings and Conclusions
The findings indicate that during the early Pahlavi period, state-led economic interventions—operating within a predominantly agrarian economy—gradually eroded the material and political bases of landed and tribal elites while expanding bureaucratic and administrative apparatuses. These processes altered the criteria of social status and access to power, even before the consolidation of an oil-based economy.
In the later Pahlavi period, the institutionalization of oil revenues qualitatively transformed this trajectory. Oil income enabled the state to bypass traditional mechanisms of social mediation and to redistribute resources through land reform, public employment, educational expansion, and bureaucratic growth. These mechanisms produced state-dependent social strata whose social mobility and material reproduction were structurally tied to state institutions rather than autonomous economic activity.
The study concludes that the transformation of the Pahlavi state was not a direct outcome of oil wealth per se, nor merely the result of authoritarian modernization. Rather, it was the cumulative product of a process in which economic transformation restructured social stratification, and this restructured social landscape, in turn, reshaped the nature of the state. By foregrounding causal mechanisms and historical sequencing, the article contributes to broader debates on state formation, political economy, and state–society relations beyond the Iranian case.
Keywords
Main Subjects
)