دولتپژوهی (Jun 2016)
Nostalgia; legitimation and anti-legitimation in the Pahlavi state
Abstract
Abstract Purpose: The interpretation of the political sphere in Pahlavi’s age, based on the nostalgia paradigm, is the scope and purpose of this paper. Nostalgia, as the fundamental situation of human mental life, can affect the political area by its own ideas, concepts and operation. In this paper, focusing on the period of Pahlavi, We intend to show that legitimacy, which is one of the basic concepts related to the politics, had taken the nostalgic nature. Nostalgia paradigm, consciously and unconsciously, had become one of the established and dominant discourses in Pahlavi’s age. Nostalgia was the point of connection of culture and politics. Nostalgia paradigm was so pervasive that even the formation of theoretical ideas and thoughts of competing sides could be achieved and fulfilled in the same paradigm. The generality of Nostalgia not only included the official, governmental and nationalist discourse, but also the rival Islamist discourses (And some other discourses). Nostalgia paradigm in politics gained credibility and legitimacy for one (government side) and worked in order to delegitimize the existing political system for other (competing discourses). Design/Methodology/Approach: Combining the historical data with the adopted explanatory approach (interpretative-phenomenological approach), this article provides an analysis of the contemporary history of Iran. This combination seeks the means of nostalgia paradigm and uses Jacques Lacan’s psychological theory of the triple order (imaginary, symbolic and real order). Also, it explains the phenomena such as meaning, legitimacy and anti-legitimacy, identity and identification, self and other, and finally, presence and absence. Findings: The problem of this paper is to analyze the relationship between nostalgia and political credibility (legitimation) and finding the answer to these questions: how nostalgia is political? Or, what the appearance of nostalgic acts at the political level and in the realm of politics means? There is a familiar and well-known response to these questions: legitimacy. But, the specific findings of this paper can be formulated as follows: Nostalgia is one of the most dominant paradigms of the intellectual, cultural, political and social life of Iranians in the 20th century; it can be claimed that the political realm became the playing field of various nostalgias. In short, nostalgia was the source of access to legitimacy and also delegitimizing. Originality/Value: (a) Using a theoretical and methodological approach to review politics and political culture in the Pahlavi period. (b) Exploring the nostalgia as the dominant paradigm in the cultural, social and political space. (c) Exploring the political dimension of nostalgia in that period. (d) Exploring the dual Operation of nostalgic paradigm in the course of Iranian history and politics in the 20th century (not only in the discourse of ancient-oriented nationalism, but also in Islamic nationalism).
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