This article critically analyzes the book “Discourse of the Left in Iran”. This book is a four-chapter book structured chronologically and causally as follows: 1) The Foundations of Left Discourse, 2) The Influence of Socialist Ideas, 3) The Rise of Communism in Iran, and 4) Arani and a New Chapter in Left Discourse. The article examines the articulation of left discourse in Iran based on the extent to which discursive elements are employed in the analysis of contemporary Iranian social history. By posing four key questions, it evaluates the methodological similarities and differences of this book concerning various historiographical approaches, including modern, social, political history, and discourse analysis. The findings indicate that the methodological heterogeneity of the book has affected its methodological coherence. Consequently, the text oscillates between traditional and modern historiography. Despite the book's title suggesting an engagement with critical discourse analysis, it at times aligns with social history and at other times with political history.
The book "Discourse of the Left in Iran (Qajar and Pahlavi Period)", in four chapters, citing the available documents, defines how the Left movement of Iran was formed in opposition to feudalism and not capitalism. The author of the book considers Iran's Left discourse as a follower of the two Left schools of Russia and Western Europe, which have been modified from time to time and used differently due to their incompatibility with Iran's culture and politics. He considers political strangulation, migration of dissidents, migration of workers, economic incapacity, creation of space for the emergence of foreign intellectual currents, attention to modern education, and sending students to Russia and Western Europe to be among the factors influencing the Iranization of Left thought. The author of the book is trying to explain the Iranian left movement as an imported movement and discourse concerning Marxism, Communism, and the Russian Revolution that transforms depending on the intensity of influence of foreign factors. Today, referring to many studies about writing history in a new way and the topic of problematization, it is clear that all phenomena have a history, and at a certain point in time, due to demographic, social, and economic changes, they became a problem and are worth studying. On the other hand, history has become more controversial, questioning, and self-measuring, and it is not compatible with the assumption of knowing and believing in the truth or a unique history. Therefore, how the Left discourse emerges, or in other words, the zero moment of a discourse, is one of the fundamental topics of discourse analysis and a way of avoiding the narrative description of history. It means that if we understand the Left discourse as an imported current or even in historical continuity with previous uprisings, such as Khorramdinan, what becomes problematic is the history of rulers and governments, which is far from the critical method and discourse analysis. In narrative and holistic history, the multitude of events, resulting forces, procedures, and techniques of power and resistance are neglected, and taking phenomena for granted in the context of history due to not paying attention to how power is exercised causes a failure to understand how the concepts and strategies leading to the formation of the new regime of truth and the lack of cultural continuity of the phenomenon are constructed. At this point, social-political historiography in Iran needs to be revised and is facing many theoretical challenges because epistemological and methodological critical reflections in the form of stable criticism and evaluation have not been considered very seriously. Despite its successes in this field and paving the way for introspective theorizing about the movement and Left parties of Iran, this book has shortcomings, the most important of which is methodological disorder. This article examines the historical-scientific formulation of the book concerning modern and traditional history, social history, political history, and discourse analysis with four questions. The first question is: Is this research among modern or traditional historiography? The results of the research answer the first question as follows: although the term Discourse, arising from the critical paradigm creates the expectation of critical reading and modern historiography of the book in the reader, the author has chosen the traditional historiography method, which is the result of a series of causal relationships considering the present as an inevitable consequence of the past. The historian periodizes the past from the perspective of the present and explains the logic of historical developments. The second question is: Can the book be placed in the category of social historiography? The answer is as follows: the temporality of the text of the book is inextricably linked with history and the historical method, and cultural events are attached to their time and have a historical nature. Therefore, it seems that this writing is included in the category of conventional social historiography; but since the role of the people in all three areas of the relationship between the people and the people, the people with the government, and the people with their material and spiritual environment are ignored or weakly presented; it is not the life history of ordinary people and cannot be social historiography. In the third question, the relationship between the book and political historiography is examined. According to the definitions of traditional and new political history, the results indicate that: since it does not deal only with those in power and political issues; it cannot be a traditional political historiography, and because populations and groups outside of power and people's interactions with political power are not the priority of this book, and events, institutions and associations are examined in the shadow of major events and not in the space of discourse; it cannot be a new political history. In the end, in response to the fact that simply using the term discourse in the title and the word power in the text, is the research considered as discourse analysis? It should be said that regardless of whether the method of discourse analysis is constructivist, role-oriented, or critical, the audience expects to encounter a terminological text that examines the elements of discourse, such as propositions, subjects, institutions, and technologies, rather than the narrative and chronology aspect or the report-like sequence of events. The word discourse is used in this book without considering its theoretical foundations, and does not refer to any of the most important components of discourse (disruption, historical reversal, power, knowledge, power-knowledge network, resistance, problematization), and the critical aspect of analyzing a discourse has been neglected. It can be said that, according to the classification of information and the way of presenting the content in this book, perhaps the title of the book justifies the presence of multiple historical methods in the text.