Comparing Max Weber’s and Javad Tabatabaei’s Methodology to the Reason for the Backwardness of Ancient Iran

Abstract

for backwardness via a philosophical approach. Tabatabai considers the refusal of thought as the reason for Iranian backwardness, believing that the cause of all the crises and backwardness of Iranian society is for the lack of philosophical rationality. Except for short excerpts from the history of Iran, Tabatabai considers the whole history of Iran as nothing but crude ideological, sociological approaches, and the absence of thought and rationality. It is for this reason that he, based on his Orientalist and subjectivist method in analyzing the reason for the backwardness of Iran, arrives at a causal relationship between the lack of rationality and the backwardness of Iran. Against his reductionist approach, he reduces all the crises of Iranian society to the lack of Western thought and rationality, Max Weber's methodology puts out that ideas and thoughts can only influence the society through relations, mediators and structures influence. Hence thinking is a social thing.

Keywords

• : subject
• object
• methodology
• backwardness