Addressing the Relationship between Power Relations of Government and Society in Pre-modern Iran

This article, using the method of historical sociology and the sociology of knowledge, attempts to address the power relations between society and government in Iran before the emergence of the Pahlavi state. Powerful social masters such as the royal family and their relatives, clergies, landowners, merchants and marketers, and ultimately local rulers and head of tribes who had a high degree of control and regulation in society, made the Iranian society to be web like. The power of the leaders of the society prevented the government from fulfilling its reformative demands and policies. The constant struggle between the state and society led to ways of achieving "compromise" by the state. "Encouraging strife" in networked society has been another way for the government to overcome this inability. This paper analyzes the structure of Iranian society and the power of the pre-modern state from the Safavid era to the beginning of the Constitutional era based on Migdal's theoretical model and seeks to answer the question: “What pattern of power relations between the state and society in pre-modern Iran did it follow?” The purpose of this study is to examine the sociological power relations of the governments with social forces from a historical perspective in order to understand the reason for the problem of the weakness of the political power of the modern state in Iran. In this article, the results suggest a kind of confrontation and contrast between governments and social forces in which government is disintegrated and the network community struggles to survive the government and social rivals.