Comparison of Political Development Discourse Approaches During Pahlavi Era and Islamic Revolution

The main discourses of Iran during the Pahlavi era and the Islamic revolution are Western and Islamic discourses. In these two discourses, there is a lot of ambiguity regarding the indicators of political development, and this issue has not been investigated in the framework of the discourse analysis method. The main question is the most important commonalities and differences between these two discourses. The most important difference is the presence or absence of the element of religion in their chain of equivalence, and that they look at political development with different central signifiers, and what they both have in common is affinity in the floating signifiers that find different meanings in the chain of equivalence of the two discourses. . The final goal of the article is to compare the approach of political development discourses during the Pahlavi era and the Islamic Revolution. To prove the hypothesis, the discourses of political development in this era were analyzed with discourse analysis and comparative methods. Pahlavi discourse emphasizes the indicators of political development in the framework of secularism and Islamic discourse emphasizes these indicators in the framework of religion. In Pahlavi's discourse, despite the desire for western models of political development, due to the existence of opposite elements such as popular participation and tyranny in the equivalence chain, the growth of political development indicators is not observed even in its western form. But in the Islamic discourse, political development as a floating signifier in relation to the central signifier i.e. authentic Islam, found a completely different meaning. In this discourse, due to the absence of signs of tyranny, as well as special attention to issues such as public participation, political development indicators have enjoyed significant growth.