The Paradigm of the Military Historiography of Mohammad Javad Mashkoor

Historiography from ancient times to the present day has gone through different approaches and according to different paradigms, different types of historiography have been formed. Basically, until constitutional revolution, Iranian historiography is political-military and the familiarity with the method and the new insights of historiography from that era onward made different historical approaches emerge. One of the most important historians of the post-Pahlavi era is Mohammad Javad Mashkoor whose military historiography grew within this discourse. This study thus intends to determine his military historiography taking a descriptive-analytical approach. It attempts to address the question of the paradigm of Mashkoor's historiography. The findings of the study indicate that Mashkoor adopts a positivist approach in his military historiography because he seems to have ontologically believed in realism and merely attempted at realizing historical facts. Epistemologically, he considered the researcher and the subjects under study as separate entities that do not affect each other. He also assumed past as a fixed reality and this sort of realism does not allow any room for relativism. Finally, from the methodological point of view, he believed in the descriptive-analytical method.