DICTATORSHIP AND RISE OF POPULAR MOVEMENT: THE CASE OF IRAN.
Item
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Title
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DICTATORSHIP AND RISE OF POPULAR MOVEMENT: THE CASE OF IRAN.
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Identifier
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AAI8629718
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identifier
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8629718
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Creator
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NODJOMI, MOHSSEN.
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Contributor
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Michael Brown
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Date
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1986
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Sociology, General
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Abstract
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This dissertation is primarily concerned with the Iranian revolution of 1979, a revolution unique in all of its aspects. It was a revolution that was not supposed to have occurred when it did; and it appeared in religious, spontaneous and mass form when it did occur, thereby combining the principles of rationality of a democratic antidictatorial movement with those of irrationality generally associated with mass uprisings. From the very onset, its paradoxical character was manifest in its patterns of development, organization, mobilization, as well as in its aspiration, ideology and leadership. Prevailing theories of revolution, in particular Marxism in its reductionist and dogmatic form did not shed any light on the social and historical conditions which gave rise to the revolution or on the specificities of its spontaneous and mass character.;Historically specific to Iranian situations has been the subordination of socio-economic development to the requirements of a dictatorship supported by foreign powers, and incessant patterns of mass resistance to it. Social conflict in Iran has tended to express itself in the struggle of society as a whole against state power, a struggle specific to pre-capitalist formation where class struggle, according to Marx, does not appear in its "pure form" transforming every struggle against state power into a struggle against capital. The revolution itself took place despite capitalist modernization and its form responded to the fact that modernization was initiated from above by the dictatorship.;This dissertation presents a general concept of modernizing dictatorship and applies it to the concrete case of Iran in order to explain how the relationship between capitalist development and under-development in that country and that between class and class struggle are and were mediated by the imperatives of dictatorship. Those imperatives are the need to consolidate and expand dictatorial power and the need constantly to renew its hegemony. The contradiction immanent in the dictatorial structure of power manifests itself in the processes of legitimation and delegitimation, disclosing the superimposed and alien character of the dictatorship, and ultimately leading to the disintegration of its repressive centralized apparatus from above and the rise of popular movement from below.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Sociology
