The Old Regime and the Islamic Republic: What 1979 Did and Did Not Do

Kevan Harris, University of California, Los Angeles

Scholarship on Iran's 1979 revolution has produced careful accounts of revolutionary mobilization and early consolidation, yet most share a common analytical habit. The "revolution" is treated as a self-contained causal event whose outcomes can be read off against a counterfactual, namely an Iran that never experienced one. The revolution, so construed, is a black box. Comparative-historical work periodizes revolutions into situation, outcome, and consolidation but stops there. A growing econometric literature constructs "synthetic Irans" from weighted averages of other countries, collapses decades of contingent historical change into a single treatment variable, and attributes outcomes to a causal agent it never bothers to open up. Neither approach follows processes forward into the decades that actually produced what we now call the Islamic Republic. This paper proposes a different path, indebted to Tocqueville's insight that administrative centralization was an old-regime inheritance rather than a revolutionary creation. Only by tracing what a revolutionary state inherited can we specify what it actually changed. The paper unpacks 1979 along three temporal dimensions. Looking backward, it traces pre-revolutionary infrastructure, from corporatist labor relations to state-peasantry linkages, that the Islamic Republic inherited and repurposed. Looking forward, it disaggregates post-consolidation state-building into programs operating on their own logics, among them mass education, primary healthcare, rural development, and the institutional legacies of the Iran-Iraq War. It then situates 1979 within world-historical time, at a moment when the postwar expansion of global developmental capacity made certain transformations achievable for states in ways unavailable to earlier revolutionary regimes and no longer remarkable for later ones. Cross-national data on revolutionary episodes show that what kind of revolution occurred explains far more than whether one did.

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 Presented in Session 162. Revolution Compared II: Revolutions Since Late Cold War