نوع مقاله : علمی - پژوهشی
نویسندگان
1 دانشجوی دکتری علوم سیاسی(گرایش مسائل ایران)، دانشکده حقوق و علوم سیاسی، دانشگاه فردوسی مشهد، مشهد، ایران.
2 دانشجوی دکتری علوم سیاسی، دانشکده حقوق و علوم سیاسی، دانشگاه فردوسی مشهد، مشهد، ایران.
3 دانشیار گروه علوم سیاسی، دانشکده حقوق و علوم سیاسی، دانشگاه فردوسی مشهد، مشهد، ایران.
چکیده
کلیدواژهها
عنوان مقاله [English]
نویسندگان [English]
Introduction:
The Constitutional Revolution in Iran can be understood not merely as a political event, but as an “epistemological arena” in which the confrontation of three symbolic horizons ultimately shaped the fate of the movement. Foundational concepts such as law, nation, freedom, sovereignty, and representation—each of which carried specific institutional meanings and functions within European modernity—became sites of semantic struggle in Qajar-era Iran. The three principal social forces of the revolution—namely the clergy, theoretical intellectuals, and instrumental intellectuals—each interpreted and redefined these concepts from markedly different perspectives. The absence of a convergent semantic field meant that this plurality of interpretations, rather than generating synergy, culminated in a structural conflict, the apex of which was the bombardment of the parliament. The failure to consolidate constitutional institutions was not solely the result of structural weaknesses or foreign interventions; it also had deep roots in the absence of “semantic consensus” among the three main social forces. Although all three groups employed a shared vocabulary—such as “law,” “freedom,” and “nation”—they reproduced these concepts in mutually contradictory ways within the field of symbolic interaction. This study seeks to answer why constitutionalism in Iran failed to produce a symbolic consensus among the social forces that supported it.
Methods:
Drawing on the theoretical framework of Herbert Blumer and the approach of symbolic interactionism, this study reinterprets the Iranian Constitutional Revolution as a میدان of contestation over the construction of meaning surrounding key concepts. It employs qualitative text analysis to examine treatises, periodicals, and writings by both intellectuals and clerics, with the aim of identifying how actors endowed constitutional concepts with meaning and how they engaged in dialogue and negotiation over them within the public sphere. To operationalize this objective, the study maps three major intellectual currents in an analytical table (including categories such as conceptions of law, relations to tradition and the West, the ultimate aims of constitutionalism, and the ideal political subject), and offers a close reading of symbolic disputes—particularly competing interpretations of the concept of the “House of Justice.”
Results and discussion:
Three distinct meaning-making projects can be identified within the Constitutional Revolution. “Theoretical intellectuals” prioritized a form of legalism grounded in rationality and the discourse of natural rights, conceiving the citizen as the primary locus of autonomy and collective reason. “Instrumental intellectuals,” by contrast, emphasized administrative order and state capacity, aiming to design a disciplined and efficient bureaucracy alongside a centralized nation-state. The clergy, on the other hand, advanced a framework known as “legitimate constitutionalism” (mashruteh-ye mashru‘eh), within which concepts such as law, justice, and sovereignty were redefined under the rubric of Islamic jurisprudence, with the preservation of the moral order of Islam as their goal; they viewed the believer as the normative subject. This tripartite configuration helps explain why shared symbols failed to yield a unified semantic stability. The discourse of mashru‘eh challenged liberal-secular readings of constitutionalism, while the state-building approach of instrumental intellectuals steered the constitutional project toward centralization and technocracy. The result was not a pre-agreed synthesis, but a persistent “semantic misalignment” that weakened the durability of alliances and hindered the institutional consolidation of constitutionalism.
In the absence of a shared political language, the process of integrating tradition and modernity failed, producing a heterogeneous outcome composed of modern institutions, traditional elements, and state authoritarianism.
Conclusion:
The trajectory of the Constitutional movement in Iran cannot be explained solely by structural constraints, since political projects endure only when institutions and shared meanings evolve in tandem. In the absence of a common political language capable of mediating among tradition, modernity, and statehood, constitutionalism became fragmented: legally modern in appearance, normatively contested, and administratively state-centric.
کلیدواژهها [English]
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