RESEARCH LETTER OF POLITICAL SCIENSE
Year:2018 | Volume:13 | Issue:3 (53)|Papers Count:7

Individual rights are one of the most important topics in new political and legal thought. Definition of natural rights for individuals transformed the place of these rights in the political and intellectual systems, and issues such as: individual freedoms, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, political and social equality, and so on were placed at the top of principles of different countries’ constitutions. In Iran, too, new concepts have emerged since the Qajar era. First, this happened in political and critical writings, and finally in the supplementary of the Persian Constitution. The principles supplementary to the Constitution have addressed these freedoms under the section of “ Nation Rights” . Individual rights in the constitutional era were subjected to the comprehensive discourse of legal positivism which had emerged during the constitutional era. In the articulation, concepts like freedom and equality were signifiers that were placed along with other signifiers like legal positivism and constitutionalism in the discourse of constitutionalism. In the present paper, this articulation is investigated through Laclau and Mouffe’ s discourse theory. The main hypothesis of this paper is that the development of the idea of freedom and equality before the constitutional revolution played an important role in the formation of the discourse of constitutionalism, and that conflicts arose over its relation to religious law during the constitutional era.

Persian poetry is among significant domains in Iranian history of thought in which political teachings are reflected. Sa'adi is considered as an important figure in Persian literature history who has attempted in versifying political teachings. The most important point in understanding Sa'adi’ s political discourse is to understand his era’ s intellectual traditions because they made him accept, reject, or affect his period’ s political issues. Having this concern in mind and using Skinner’ s intention methodology to discover Sa'adi’ s intention, the present study attempts to study Sa'adi period’ s worldview and intellectual milieu that is here referred to as intellectual traditions. The researchers are going to discover how thinking was appeared at the intellectual and political discussions being present within the intellectual traditions and how question and answer, proposition and prescription, reasoning and deduction were manifested. Thus, the main research question is how Sa'adi period’ s constructive intellectual traditions of political conventions could be interpreted? The hypothesis of the present study is that regarding Iran’ s past intellectual traditions and the 7th century’ s historical context, advices for princes, Mongol Yassa, the Sunni theory of Caliphate, Sufism intellectual tradition, the Shiite theory of Imamate, and historiography as the most important political traditions of Sa'adi period constitute the political conventions of his era.

The Iranian constitutional revolution is the dawn of the modernization and the rising of a form of constitutional state which was possible by transition from epistemological-political foundations of the old regime and the old tradition. What is undeniable in this incident is the controversy over the foundations of the new state for and against it by the first generation of Iranian intellectuals of the constitutional period. Recapitulating the works of three intellectuals, namely Mirza Malkam Khan Nazemol Dowleh, Mirza Yousuf Khan Mostasharol Dowleh and Mirza Fathali Akhundzadeh, this study tries to show which therapy they offer for transition from the foundations of the old regime and the nature of new regime, what role they consider for the state in this process, and according to this, how they can be categorized into statist and anti-statist groups. For this purpose, the views of these three intellectuals on the pivotal issues such as: the image of the Iranian and the West civilizations, the role and the position of the state, as well as the reasons for the ups and downs of the Iranian civilization and the ways to overcome them have been examined and a glimpse of their approach has been offered. Eventually, it has also been attempted to determine the relative position of each of these three figures on a spectrum from extremist statism on one end and extremist anti-statism on the other.

The paper discussed the typology of studies on political development in Iran. The purpose of the paper is to identify the diversity of studies related to Iran's political development. The research method is systematic review, and the statistical population of the research is all the books related to the political development of Iran being printed after the Islamic Revolution, the number of which is amounted 145 in this study. The findings showed that almost over half of the books were published between 1997 and 2006, and political deterioration or degeneration of Iran was discussed in 76. 6% of those books. Most of the books have been written with modernization and democratization approach, and an empirical-historical method has been used in a significant portion of the books. According to about 30% of the books, the main factors of being politically underdeveloped are authoritarianism, political culture elements, and the gap between traditionalism and modernism. Although these studies did not follow the western classical patterns of specimens, instead tried to localize political-social science in Iran, this has led to the plurality and diversity of views and the lack of a clear picture of Iran's political development. Therefore, one of the most important factors is the diversity of experts’ views in this regard.

The purpose of this study is reflection on the educational policy in political science with an emphasis on Analysis of the curriculum ideologies of political science students in Tehran University. This research has quantitative nature and applied purpose and in terms of data collecting is a descriptive survey. The statistical population consisted of 500 postgraduate students in The University of Tehran 2017, in which the sample size was appointed as 232, using Cochran formula. And 100 men and 132 women were selected using stratified sampling method. The data gathering tool was the standard questionnaire of curriculum ideology of the Schiro (2008). Face and content validity of the questionnaire was obtained by the consensus of educational science specialists and the reliability of the questionnaire using the Cronbach's alpha coefficient was calculated 0. 88. In order to analyze the data, the researchers used the Friedman test for ranking. Findings in general show that the most prominent ideology of the curriculum of political science students at the University of Tehran in the postgraduate studies is the ideology of scientific scholars and social performance, and the least important ideology is the social and learning rehabilitators. Therefore, as the political science major requires self-sufficient students with characteristics such as critical thinking, high creativity, deep analysis, intellectual autonomy, widespread social relationships, and high spirit of demanding changes in the peripheral environment and the spirit of inquiry and so on. These features are only seen in students with social and learning rehabilitation ideologies. Therefore, it is imperative that the authorities and practitioners of higher education change educational policies as the necessary measures to attract students with the ideologies of social reconstruction or try to change the ideology of students in this field of study in line with the ideology of social and learner-centered rehabilitators.

Darisuh Shaygan, besides Seyed Ahmad Fardid, Jalal Al Ahmad and Ali Shariati, is one of the most prominent intellectuals of Iran’ s recent five decades. He has dwelled on the concepts of Identity and Iranian Identity in regard to the challenges in the world today. This article is intended to find out the approach of Darisuh Sahygan towards identity crisis and challenges in the modern contemporary world. The main underlying idea is that he, emphasizing upon the maintenance of native identity, had never totally rejected the western culture, but he has proposed the necessity of having knowledge and understanding about the western culture. Therefore, the most important characteristics of Shaygan’ s writings and opinions are his simultaneous criticism of “ eastern traditional ideology” and “ western modernization ideology. This article focuses on Shaygan’ s mental endeavors with regard to the authentic and original identity in traditional cultures and civilizations in confronting the modern world and modernization.

Communitarianism is one of the most important schools of thought in contemporary political philosophy, which has different roots in philosophy. This paper examines the analysis and interpretation of the epistemological fields of the philosophy of communitarianism based on late Wittgenstein's ideas. In the book "Philosophical investigation", Wittgenstein through an epistemological turn argued the theory of "linguistic games" indicating the use of words in the social life interactions. The present paper examines the effects of the late Wittgenstein epistemic-linguistic revolution on the political thought of communitarian philosophers and has explained and interpreted the relation between epistemological changes and the field of politics. The results of the discussion suggest that the late Wittgenstein philosophy has indirectly helped the communitarian Political philosophy forming a contextualism pattern. Then it has criticized the position of liberalism as a meta-narrative and comprehensive language. The main purpose of the authors is to show how the late Wittgenstein philosophical insight can be used in the areas where he has not directly addressed in his work.