Spragens' Understanding of the Resurgence of Archaism in the Post-Constitutional Period

The society and politics of Iran during the Qajar era were sick and its treatment seemed inevitable; Therefore, many saw the solution in a profound and transformative political and social campaign. Due to such a view, the constitutional revolution commenced, which of course failed. As a result of this failure, a discourse called "archaism" was formed. The most prominent founders of it are Aref Qazvini, Mirzadeh Eshghi, Ebrahim Pordavoud, Moshfeq Kazemi, Kazemzadeh Iranshahr, Sadegh Hedayat, and Mahmoud Afshar. In their intellectual and speech acts, they emphasized the proposition that by converting to the ancient utopia, one can give a new soul to the lifeless body of Iran and the past glory of Iran could be revived. Following the many representations of this speech, archaism led to dominate over other discourses in the Pahlavi era and give a new meaning to the Iranians' lifeworld. Since the framework investigation of the "how" of the emergence of this discourse has not been included in the research agenda; Therefore, the current study tries to answer the question, "How did the discourse of post-constitutional archaism emerge?", by using Spragens' theoretical model and "qualitative content analysis" technique.  The findings show that this discourse is the result of the cognitive efforts of intellectuals and emerges from the heart of multi-layered cognitive processes - such as being aware of Iran's instabilities, recognizing their roots, searching for a utopia, and evaluating and selecting liberating solutions.