Pre-Capıtalıst Iran, a Theoretical History
Abbas Vali
I. B. Tauris
The land reform of 1962 and the ensuing social and economic transformation in the Iranian countryside fundamentally altered the political and intellectual scene in Iran. It revealed the striking persistence and relative strength of pre-capitalist relations in agriculture, and the historical and political writings that followed this crucial event assigned to them an unparalleled significance in the history of modern Iran.1 Social scientists, economic historians and political activists began to reassess the conventional interpretations of contemporary Iran in the light of new developments in the countryside. The result was a revival of interest in the question of the transition to capitalism, with a view to explaining the persistence of pre-capitalist features and the underdeveloped state of capitalist relations in Iranian agriculture.2 Conceptual definitions of pre-capitalist relations, therefore, became an indispensable part of the study of the dynamics and ...
In memory of A. R. Ghassemlou
whose tragic murder set back the cause of
peace and democracy in Iran
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This study was originally planned as a doctoral thesis on the problems of the transition to capitalism and the emergence of the modern nation-state in Iran. It has undergone many transformations since; and my first thanks must go to Paul Hirst, who supervised it through all its changes with unflagging patience and interest. The work, as will be apparent, owes much to him. I also wish to thank Athar Hussein, with whom the original idea was discussed, although a very long time ago. Friends and colleagues in the Middle Eastern Study Group have also offered support and encouragement; my thanks are due particularly to Roger Owen and Sami Zubaida. I wish also to remember with gratitude conversations with David Rosenberg, who took an active interest both in pre-capitalist societies and in the completion of this work; sadly he did not live to see it finished. I am more than grateful to Anna Enayat, who has been an editor of exemplary tolerance in the face of seemingly endless delay, as well as an informed and intelligent commentator on the text. Thanks also to Phyllis Roberts for the initial typing out, and to my friend Rose Gann, who retyped and reorganised the final draft. In the last stages, Katharine Hodgkin read through and revised the text; without her it would have been far more difficult to read.
PREFACE
This essay is neither an exercise in historiography, nor a case for the necessity of theory in historical writing; rather, it is an argument for the theoretical character of historical discourse. A consideration of this issue involves a brief preliminary discussion of the object and the nature of historical knowledge.
Iran is a key case in the social scientific literature on pre-capitalist societies. Conceptual definitions of pre-capitalist Iran and characterizations of its economic structure, social relations and political institutions are as old as the discipline of social theory. In the Iranian context, it is the use of theory in historical argument which distinguishes modern from traditional historiography, marking the point of departure from the scholastic antiquarianism and chronologism which dominated the field before the early decades of the present century. This move towards the use of theory and conceptual knowledge in Iranian historiography was neither an arbitrary choice "nor a purely scholastic undertaking; theory proved indispensable to historical writing when a new generation of historians and social scientists began to emphasizes the contemporary value of historical knowledge. The historical studies which subsequently appeared during the 1960s, especially those concerned with the pre-capitalist era, assumed a specific form. They were genealogies of the present rather than studies of the past, entailing conceptions of causality grounded in specific philosophies of History, whether positivist, Marxist or Weberian.
This emphasis on the contemporary value of historical knowledge, which precipitated the use of theory in historical argument, arose out of the prevailing political and ideological conditions. The introductory chapter of this study shows that politics (rather than the subjective interests of the historians and social scientists) determined the choice of the object of investigation. The idea that definitions of the pre-capitalist past and characterizations of its social relations and political institutions are essential to the analysis and understanding of the capitalist present, its structural dynamics and developmental tendencies, was shared by different groups among the Iranian intelligentsia. The prevailing historicism, despite its diverse philosophical bases, thus affirmed the necessity of theory, and the revolution of 1979 gave a powerful impetus to this popular but still nascent trend in historical writing. The spate of work which has followed this historic event has further consolidated the tenuous link between theory and history: philosophies of history have proved indispensable to analyses which are primarily concerned with causal explanations of the demise of the Pahlavi autocracy and the rise of the Shii theocracy.
The practitioners of modem Iranian historiography, in Iran and in the West, for the most part use conceptual frames^ and definitions rather liberally, and often with no methodological restraint or regard for their theoretical validity, either as ideal tvpe models for comparison or as means for the analysis of concrete conditions. The conceptual definitions of pre-capitalist Iran deployed in modem historical writing signify a real social totality which existed in the past in a continuous manner, evolving in the course of time into different forms expressive of the modality of its uniform essence. This real social totality, be it feudal, Asiatic, patrimonial or traditional, is held to be present in the facts of Iranian history. The conceptual definitions of pre-capitalist Iran, whatever their theoretical foundations, constitute these facts as the object and the means of validation of historical knowledge. The evidence, selected by the historian, is both the point of departure and the ultimate court of appeal in .historical enquiry. The theoretical forms from which the conceptual definitions of pre-capitalist Iran are derived remain external to the process of the selection and investigation of the evidence; they are means to knowledge, which enter and leave the process of its production without influencing the result, in much the same way as a catalyst in natural scientific experiments.
This particular relationship between fact and theory which underpins the conceptual definitions of pre-capitalist Iran is not arbitrary, but rooted in the epistemological assumptions of the modem historical discourse on Iran; and these assumptions are empiricist. To characterize them as such is neither an unfounded assertion nor an unwarranted generalization. The concept of empiricism deployed in this essay refers to the common consequence of diverse theoretical and philosophical traditions which identify knowledge with the ^essence of the real as present in the fact, given and self-explanatory. It is a methodological procedure for the production of knowledge: the knowledge of the real is abstracted from within given facts by theoretical and conceptual means which facilitate the process without affecting its outcome. This doctrine of method is the hallmark of the modem historical discourse on Iran, and diversity in the philosophical bases of the discourse does not invalidate its characterization as empiricist. The empiricist character of the modem historical discourse on Iran will persist so long as it continues to insist on the unassailable status of the fact the both the object and the means of evaluation of historical knowledge.
The empiricist tradition characteristically identifies history with the past as signified in the body of the evidence available for investigation; historical knowledge is thus the knowledge of the past present in the evidence. The validity of the empiricist conception of history and historical knowledge is dependent on certain key assumptions: that the fact is identical with the real signified in it; that the evidence of the historical past is identical with it; and that the past, the object of historical knowledge, exists as presence in discourse. Central to these assumptions is the concept of the fact as pre-given and self-explanatory.
This essay rejects the central tenet of the empiricist tradition in historical writing. The contention is that facts are not given, but constructed in discourse: thus they are discursive constructs rather than autonomous objectivities. The constitution of the facts as objects of knowledge is a conceptual process premised on determinate theoretical forms and conditions. The investigation of the evidence, the process of production of knowledge, presupposes conceptual means and procedures which are informed by specific theoretical forms. These forms determine the conceptual structure and the order of the historical discourse in which the knowledge of the real signified in the evidence is represented. Facts, therefore, are representations of the real in discourse by specific conceptual means and determinate theoretical forms; they are not identical with the real signified in them. Contrary to the empiricist assumption, history is not identical with the past, nor is historical knowledge die essence of the past present in given facts. History is the representation of the past in discourse, and the theoretical forms and conceptual means which inform and facilitate the process of production of historical knowledge have determinate effects on the order and the structure of historical discourse which is the order and the structure of historical knowledge.
The constructive concept of the fact suggested by a critique of the empiricist procedure of modem historical writing on pre-capitalist Iran has wider implications for the project of this study. It implies above all that the ontological distinction between fact and concept, historical and theoretical knowledge, central to the empiricist tradition in history, can no longer be sustained. For this distinction rests on the pre-given and auto-significatory attributes of the fact, attributes which underpin the empiricist identification of the evidence with the real signified in it; hence the characterization of the evidence as the raw material of historical knowledge, factual and objective, distinct from conceptual knowledge which belongs to the field of the subjective. Empiricism absolutizes the distinction between facts and concepts in order to establish an exclusion zone around historiography, treating it as a field of objective knowledge governed by its own rules of investigation, modes of proof and means of validation, which defy the theoretical forms of evaluation of discourse appropriate to other disciplines in human and social sciences.
The rejection of the empiricist conception of the fact proposed by this study undermines the privileged status assigned to historiography in human and social sciences. Historical facts are no more given and self-explanatory than theoretical concepts. Both are discursive constructs, although of different kinds; the difference between them is conceptual rather than ontological. History is essentially a theoretical 'discipline; historical knowledge is no less conceptual than philosophy or social theory. It requires theoretical forms of reasoning, proof, and evaluation of discourse, radically different from that prescribed by the empiricist tradition. There is no valid justification for its exemption from the theoretical forms of evaluation of discourse. The validity of an argument depends on its discursive coherence and logical consistency. History is no exception to this rule.
This, then, is the argument behind the idea of a theoretical history, which forms the project of the present study. The project has two aims; first to examine the conceptual structure of the modem historical discourse on pre-capitalist Iran; and second, to develop an alternative theoretical frame for the conceptualization of its social relations, economic structures and political institutions. Reference to the evidence of Iranian history is frequently made in the course of the enquiry; this invocation of the historical evidence serves a particular purpose, namely, to illustrate and substantiate the theoretical arguments developed in the course of the enquiry. It is not the means for the evaluation of historical knowledge. Chronology is not the organizing principle of the enquiry, determining the order and the sequence of analysis; the order of discourse in this enquiry is imposed by the concepts deployed in the analysis.
This essay is divided into three parts. The opening chapter explores the state of historiography in modem Iran, and discusses the political and ideological conditions which precipitated the surge of interest in studies of pre-capitalist Iran, both within and outside the country. It further surveys the contours of the controversy over the periodizations of Iranian history, and the characterizations of the Iranian social formation before the advent of the constitutional state in the early twentieth century. This survey focuses on the political and ideological undercurrents of the controversy, which largely specify theJ theoretical stance of the main contributors to the debate.
The remaining chapters of Part I deal with the definitions of pre-capitalist Iran as a feudal and an Asiatic society respectively. They examine the theoretical status and validity of the most influential of such definitions, tracing their inconsistencies to the Marxist concepts of the Asiatic and feudal modes of production, and in particular to the anthropological concept of economic property and ownership on which the political definitions of the relations of production associated with them are grounded. Chapter 2 finds the concept of the Asiatic mode of production theoretically inconsistent and discursively incoherent. Taxation as a political measure, it is argued, cannot by itself constitute the relations of production; and the tax-rent couple, emphasizing the state ownership of the land, can provide the basis for these relations only if the forces of production entailed in the concept of the Asiatic mode of production are radically modified to include state power. Thus the theoretical inconsistency of the conceptof the Asiatic mode of production could be rectified by a redefinition of the forces of production in which the state would be reconceptualized as an economic force: but the conditinns necessary for such a reconceptualization namely, large-scale, state-controlled, labour-intensive public projects did not exist in pre-capitalist Iran.
Chapter 3 argues that the concepts of Iranian feudalism deployed l by the Marxist historians are also theoretically inconsistent. These historians attempt unsuccessfully to conceptualize Iranian feudalism as a variant of the Marxist concept of the feudal mode of production; a failure, it is further argued, which results not so much from the alleged structural differences between Iranian and European conditions, as from the inconsistencies of the classical Marxist concept of the feudal mode of production serving as the frame of reference. This concept, which conflates the relations of production with their juridico-political conditions of existence, regards the political as the constitutive of the feudal mode of production, thus preventing the Conceptualization of its variants in terms of the specificity of the forces and relations of production on a local or regional level. The chapter concludes with an argument for the reconceptualization of feudal rent as a necessary condition for the Conceptualization of the economic structure of feudalism in Iran.
Part II, consisting of a single chapter (Chapter 4), thus begins with a critical evaluation of the political concept of feudal rent in Marxist discourse and of some authoritative accounts of it in contemporary Marxist theory, identifying the causes of its incoherence and the theoretical consequences thereof. Throughout the course of investigation, the mode of the conceptualization of capitalist relations of production in Capital serves as a point of reference as well as the basis for the construction of an economic concept of feudal rent. Feudal rent as an economic category is structured by exchange relations emanating from the possession of and separation from the means of production between the economic agents involved in the process of prodution. The crucial factor in this respect is a conception of economic property which results from the subsumption of the producer in the process of production, and which as such invariably involves his separation from the means and the conditions of production. The final section of this part uses the economic concept of feudal rent to outline the specificity of feudal economic structure. This then serves as the frame of reference for the conceptualization of the economics tincture of Iranian feudalism, the constituent elements of which are outlined in Part III.
Part III consists of three chapters, dealing with the conceptualization of the processes of the formation and appropriation of economic property in land, and their juridico-political conditions of existence in medieval Iran. This involves a critique of the political conception of the iqta, by which it is maintained that the iqta, though a form of land 'grant, did not constitute private property in land. The prevailing Islamic conception of power, and the resultant structure of command and obedience, prevented the formation of private property in land and the corresponding emergence of an autonomous land-owning class along West European lines. The political conception of the iqta, it is argued in Chapter 5, presupposes specific juridico-political conditions of existence which were not present in medieval Iran. The medieval state in Iran, exemplified by the Saljuq state, was a particular articulation of the political and the economic, which thwarted the development of conditions for territorial centralism, instituting instead a decentralized political and military structure sustained by the exchange of military service for land revenue. This chapter further shows that the conditions of production of land revenue do not bear any relevance to the political definitions of the iqta, which insist on the ownership of land by the Sultan or the State. These conditions are treated as external to the processes of the formation and appropriation of landed property in medieval Iran.
Chapter 6 focuses on the concept of absolute ownership of the land entailed in medieval political discourse, and also in recent statements in the standard and authoritative social and economic histories of pre-capitalist Iran. It is argued that die concept of absolute ownership does not have an autonomous discursive status, but is an adjunct of die ancient Persian (Sassanian) theory of government, which argues tor autocratic rule as prerequisite to order and stability. An examination of the conditions which precipitated the revival of the theory in medieval political discourse confirms this argument. In this case too, autocratic rule is considered as the condition of social stability and economic prosperity. The invocation of the concept of absolute ownership in contemporary historical writing, however, is rooted in the popular but erroneous identification of autocratic rule with sovereign power. The autocratic state in pre-capitalist Tran lacked the capacity to institute territorial centralism, and effecfive rule depended in practice on a decentralized military power structure based on land-holding. In other words, the institutional conditions of existence of absolute ownership are given to the discourse, without being theorized with reference to the specificity of the polity in medieval Iran. In the final section of this chapter, the analysis argues for the importance of control over the land in the conceptualization of the process of the formation and appropriation of private property in land, and emphasizes the significance of the conditions of subsumption of the direct producer which underpins this process. This issue is taken up and explored in Chapter 6, which involves a detailed analysis of the organization of production, the forms and conditions of tenancy, and the modes of extraction and realization of surplus in pre-capitalist Iran.
The last and concluding part of the essay is an attempt to construct a concept of Iranian feudalism, drawing on the analyses in the preceding parts. The concept of Iranian feudalism signifies a structure of social relations specific to the Iranian social formation from the Saljuq to the constitutional period. It is intended as a means for Historical enquiry, to enable students of Iranian history to outline the general structural characteristics of the Iranian social formation at various points during this long period. Feudal social relations are conceptualized in terms of their economic, juridico-political and ideological conditions of existence. But the concrete forms in which these conditions existed historically—i.e. the specific form-of-the state, the political and ideological processes—and practices, and cultural relations—in pre-capitalist Iran are not given in the concept of Iranian feudalism. It follows that no definite form of state and politics can be deduced from this concept. Such forms are included in the concept of the Iranian social formation, and should be theorized in terms of the concrete conditions of Iranian history in various phases of its development in the feudal era. This is the task of historical writing dealing with specific episodes of the feudal period. It is hoped that this essay can assist such studies to avoid some obvious pitfalls of the empiricist tradition in their quest to extract the truth from the evidence.
Part I
1. Marxism and the Historiography of Pre-Capitalist Iran
The land reform of 1962 and the ensuing social and economic transformation in the Iranian countryside fundamentally altered the political and intellectual scene in Iran. It revealed the striking persistence and relative strength of pre-capitalist relations in agriculture, and the historical and political writings that followed this crucial event assigned to them an unparalleled significance in the history of modern Iran.1 Social scientists, economic historians and political activists began to reassess the conventional interpretations of contemporary Iran in the light of new developments in the countryside. The result was a revival of interest in the question of the transition to capitalism, with a view to explaining the persistence of pre-capitalist features and the underdeveloped state of capitalist relations in Iranian agriculture.2 Conceptual definitions of pre-capitalist relations, therefore, became an indispensable part of the study of the dynamics and direction of capitalist development in modem Iran.
Studies of the transition to capitalism in Iran focused, almost invariably, on the Constitutionalist period, 1891-1912. Historians and social scientists of different political and ideological persuasions viewed this as a turning point in Iranian history, a historical landmark separating the capitalist present from the pre-capitalist past.3 While there was a general consensus on the predominantly transitional and increasingly capitalist character of the post-Constitutionalist era, opinions on the precise nature of pre-capitalist relations in the preceding period were sharply divided. The opposing views on this issue offered two distinct periodizations of Iranian history, both associated, in different ways, with Marxist theory, which for reasons of convenience will be termed the Soviet and the Asiatic periodizations of Iranian history; that is, the periodizations and interpretations ...
Abbas Vali
Pre-Capıtalıst Iran
A Theoretical History
I.B. Tauris
I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd Publishers
Pre-capitalist Iran
A Theoretical History
Abbas Vali
I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd
Publishers
London - New York
Published in 1993 by
I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd
45 Bloomsbury Square
London WC1A 2HY
Copyright © 1993 by Abbas Vali
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book,
or any part thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission
in writing from the publisher.
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.
Typeset by Photoprint, Torquay
Manufactured in Great Britain by
WBC Print Ltd, Bridgend, Mid Glamorgan, Wales.
ISBN 1-85043-554-5
