An Analysis of the Concept of State-Orientation in the Tradition of Political Writing; Pre-Constitutional Period (With Emphasis on the Opinions of Mirza Abol-Qasim Ghaem-e-Maqam Farahani and Mirza Hossein Khan Sepahsalar)

Introduction: From the Saljuqid era to the Qajar period, the Mirror for Princes tradition was the principal arena for analysing state action in Iran. The advent of modernity, however, fractured its classical theoretical foundations. Focusing on the pre-Constitutional era, this article investigates the meaning of state-centrism in two late Mirror for Princes treatises— Monshaat of Qaem-Maqam and Tanzimat Sepahsalar—with the aim of explaining how each text responds to three intertwined crises: modernity, the collapse of the traditional order, and the upheaval of the political realm. The study shows their contribution to the transition from a king-centric to a state-centric model.

Methods: The analytical framework is Thomas Spragens’ crisis–diagnosis–prescription model, which treats political theories as rational responses to concrete disorder and posits four steps in every political text: observing disorder, tracing its roots, outlining a desired order, and devising remedies. A comparative-historical reading was employed to situate data extracted from Qaem-Maqam’s and Sepahsalar’s works—as well as historians’ and commentators’ reports—within Spragens’ schema.

Results and discussion: The comparison reveals that Qaem-Maqam, reacting to military defeats and the erosion of authority, re-defined the expediency of the state along three axes: (a) separating the ruler’s decisions from religious authority through the idea of an “independent monarchy”; (b) replacing personal loyalties with the emerging notion of “national interests”; and (c) accentuating the distinction between the institution of the state and the person of the monarch, evident in his letters and protests to the shah. Prescriptively, he deemed a standing army, fiscal reform, and a professionalised bureaucracy indispensable for the passage to a modern state. Several decades later, Sepahsalar advanced the next stage by proposing the Tanzimat Hasana. Inspired by Ottoman reforms, he outlined a “regulated monarchy” in which royal power is curbed through three mechanisms: (1) the creation of a nine-member Council of Ministers headed by a premier accountable to both the shah and the council; (2) the establishment of Provincial Reform Councils with the participation of fiscal officers and local notables to supervise taxation, security, and subjects’ rights; and (3) limiting provincial governors by transparent fiscal rules and mandatory accountability to the centre. Although both authors still presuppose the legitimacy of monarchy, they chart a two-step path from absolute kingship to a rule-of-law state: Qaem-Maqam stresses the conceptual separation of state from king and the creation of bargaining capacity within the old administrative structure, whereas Sepahsalar, through administrative legislation, institutionalises the division of functions and a bureaucratic hierarchy. Overall, late pre-Constitutional Mirror for Princes texts depart from the moralising tone of medieval advice literature and move toward a language of institutional and governmental planning.

Conclusions: The findings indicate that the modern Mirror for Princes tradition successfully reinvented the mechanisms of the nascent state within its classical idiom and in continuity with the past while confronting the crises of modernity. Qaem-Maqam disentangled the nexus of kingship and state, and Sepahsalar, through the Tanzimat, laid the groundwork for a law-bound bureaucracy. Thus, the seeds of constitutionalism were sown in pre-Constitutional Mirror for Princes texts as a response to crises through the articulation of state-centrism.