The Role of Intellectual Elites in Cultural Policy in the First Pahlavi Period

Cultural policy is one of the most important tasks of governments in changing society from tradition to modernity. These governments use force to modernize the culture, economy and society. In these governments, intellectual elites play an important role in cultural policy-making and determine the executive agenda of governments. After the establishment of the Pahlavi regime, cultural policy became one of the main programs of political elites in Iran and the intellectual elite provided them with new cultural ideas. The purpose of this study is to critique the cultural policies of the first Pahlavi period from the perspective of intellectual and political elites. Therefore, by studying their writings, an attempt is made to study the cultural characteristics of the Pahlavi regime in the political and cultural modernization of Iran. The results of the study show that Reza Shah's centralization policies were able to establish security in Iran and rule the central government in Iran instead of tribes and nomads. This centralism was the result of the efforts of intellectual elites who emphasized authoritarian nation-building in their writings. Authoritarian modernization in the first Pahlavi period intensified social and political divisions and confrontations between tradition and modernity in the coming decades in Iran. This research is descriptive-analytical and the necessary data have been collected by documentary-historical method