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

As one of the most famous Iranian thinkers, Seyyed Javad Tabatabai has analyzed the reason 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. There is always a concrete whole to which ideas and relationships belong in an intertwined way. Therefore, the refusal of thought at the social level is relevant as a refusal to move in relationships and to be locked in the structure of concrete existence. For Max Weber's sociology, Protestantism is not defined as an explanatory factor for capitalism, but as a factor that defines human motives for having a particular view of work, life, saving, and wealth. Max Weber does not say that capitalism is the invention of Protestantism, but that his attention is drawn to the principle in life, an aspect of which is economic rationality. In essence, it is irrational, because it is a wealth-making without a motive for consumption. It is a kind of trick via which individual pursuit is not taken into account. In austerity and hard work and Calvinist restraint, Max Weber sees the irrational element that is at the forefront of modern capitalist rationality. One cannot speak of modern rationality unless one pays attention to capitalism. Weberian rationality, then, is rationality intertwined with actions and institutions and historical rationality. The research hypothesis is that in analyzing and understanding the backwardness of ancient Iran, one should pay attention to the organic relationship between ideas, actions, and institutions. It is not possible to have a correct understanding of the reasons for backwardness with Tabatabai's reductionist approach, reducing history and its dialectical contradictions to individuals and beliefs.