Iran today is a wounded and exhausted country: a land devastated by war, sanctions, structural corruption, unemployment, infrastructural decay, and the chronic inefficiency of its political order. Millions have been driven to the edge of despair. A significant portion of society, crushed beneath poverty, instability, and repression, no longer trusts the promises of the state nor sees a clear horizon before it. The Islamic Republic itself, despite all of its revolutionary rhetoric, has in many respects become a heavy, aging, and ineffective structure incapable of resolving the country’s foundational crises. This reality cannot be denied, and any analysis that ignores it inevitably descends into political propaganda.
Yet revolutions do not end merely because a country falls into civil war, suffers foreign invasion, or even witnesses the collapse of a regime. This is one of the greatest political illusions of our age. A genuine revolution is not a singular event but a prolonged, historical, violent, and deeply contradictory process through which a society repeatedly oscillates between liberty and despotism, republicanism and authoritarianism, advance and regression, until a new political order is ultimately forged and consolidated.
From this perspective, what is unfolding in Iran today is not simply the crisis of a dying regime, but the continuation of an extended revolutionary process that, both logically and historically, must culminate in the establishment of a political structure grounded in popular sovereignty, separation of powers, parliamentarianism, absolute equality before the law, and ultimately a broader renaissance and rebirth of Iranian civilization and humanity itself. This process may be traced, at minimum, to the Constitutional Revolution of the early twentieth century, and it has not yet reached its final station. Neither monarchy nor clerical rule, neither the manipulations of political opportunists governing the country, nor the foreign invasions of the Allied powers in 1941, Saddam Hussein’s war against Iran, nor the present attacks by Israel and the United States, have succeeded in imprisoning this historic force or casting it permanently to the ground.
The Relationship Between the Islamic Revolution and Iran’s Continuous Revolution.
Contrary to conventional assumptions, the Islamic Republic did not represent the end of Iran’s revolution; rather, it constituted one of its most tragic, contradictory, and historically necessary phases. The 1979 Revolution required the active participation of millions of Iranians: rural populations, urban marginals, women and men, the elderly and the youth, traditionalists and modernists alike. It demanded the integration into social and economic life of vast masses that had been pushed to the social and geographical periphery by the elitist and court-centered order of the Pahlavi monarchy.
The Shah’s regime proved incapable of incorporating these millions into the construction of a modern capitalist order and, at times, violently suppressed demands for such participation. The revolution thus emerged as the instinctive-historical movement of the Iranian people toward modern civilization—much like a flower turning instinctively toward sunlight. Iranian society possessed a profound and widespread desire to appropriate the achievements of modernity. From the earliest phases of the oil nationalization movement onward, the Iranian people articulated this aspiration, yet Mohammad Reza Shah repeatedly repressed it.
In this sense, the Iranian nation made what many at the time perceived as an optimal historical choice in 1979: it transcended the Pahlavi monarchy, compelled both Western powers and the Guadeloupe Conference order to retreat before the force of the revolution, and consigned monarchy to the museum of obsolete historical forms.
Just as the French Revolution did not immediately produce liberty and stability after 1789—but instead passed through the Reign of Terror, the devouring of the revolution’s own children, Thermidorian reaction, monarchical restoration, civil war, and foreign intervention—the Iranian Revolution may likewise traverse a similar or hybrid historical trajectory. Iran’s revolution continues to move through bloodshed, repression, war, defeat, and the persistent danger of restoration by ancien régime forces.
France required nearly a century and a half of upheaval before the consolidation of a stable republican order. From 1789 until the eventual stabilization of the Fifth Republic after the mid-twentieth century, more than a century elapsed. Judging the Iranian Revolution within the narrow timeframe of a few years or even several decades is therefore fundamentally ahistorical.
A New Interpretation of the Iranian Revolution
What distinguishes this perspective within Iranian political discourse is not merely support for or opposition to a particular regime, but rather its understanding of revolution itself. Large segments of monarchist discourse portray the 1979 Revolution as a “historical deviation,” reducible simply to the fall of the monarchy. Simultaneously, the official discourse of the Islamic Republic attempts to freeze the revolution within the closed framework of an “Islamic Revolution” that supposedly reached completion decades ago.
This essay instead advances a different proposition: the Iranian Revolution is an unfinished, continuous, and trans-systemic phenomenon that transcends both monarchy and clerical rule. From this standpoint, both the Pahlavi monarchy and the Islamic Republic represent distinct yet historically related manifestations of the crisis of modern state formation in Iran. One spoke in the language of monarchy, authoritarian nationalism, and paternalistic statism; the other in the language of jurisprudence, guardianship, and religious ideology. Both, whether in power or in opposition, have repeatedly produced hybrid, distorted, and deformed versions of the modern state out of fear of being overcome by the revolution itself.
For precisely this reason, the discourse of a “Second Republic” is simultaneously attacked by monarchists and hardline Islamist forces alike. Despite their apparent antagonism, both camps share a common objective: freezing Iranian history within one of two closed narratives—either a return to monarchy or the eternal preservation of the Islamic Republic.
The idea of a Second Republic regards both monarchy and clerical rule as belonging to the past: two distinct but related forms of traditional authority in Iran. One speaks in the language of dynastic legitimacy, centralized nationalism, and paternal authority; the other in the language of shari‘a, guardianship, and sacred political authority. Yet both ultimately stand in contradiction to popular sovereignty, civic freedom, and the right of collective self-determination.
Consequently, the discourse of the Second Republic is neither a project of monarchical restoration nor one of reforming or preserving the Islamic Republic. Rather, it is a project of historical transcendence beyond both systems. It seeks the permanent removal of religion, supralegal institutions, and sacred ideology from the sphere of political power.
This discourse advocates a secular, democratic, social republic grounded in citizenship rights: a republic in which religion is not an instrument of governance; power is not hereditary; the state does not own society; women are not second-class citizens; ethnicity and language are not tools of exclusion and centralization; and freedom of thought and organization are not treated as privileges granted by the state. The Second Republic is envisioned as a post-ideological republic: neither the rule of the jurist, nor the rule of dynasty, nor the rule of a sacred party or self-proclaimed historical savior. Legitimacy in such an order derives neither from blood, nor religion, nor myth, nor historical destiny, but solely from the free vote of citizens.
Where We Stand Today
Amid war, foreign assault, and the threat of fragmentation and collapse, one of the great contradictions of Iranian history has once again become visible. A force that itself emerged from one of the most contradictory phases of the Iranian Revolution—the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—has now effectively become one of the instruments defending the historical existence of the modern Iranian nation.
This defense cannot be understood merely as the defense of the Islamic Republic, just as the military campaigns of revolutionary France under Napoleon Bonaparte cannot be reduced solely to the expansion of Bonapartist state power. Despite their violence, authoritarian tendencies, and imperial ambitions, the armies of revolutionary France historically contributed to the destruction of Europe’s feudal order and to the dissemination of modern concepts such as nationhood, citizenship, and republicanism across Europe and beyond.
Iranian Renaissance Against the Far-Right Discourse of the White House and Pahlavi Monarchism
From this perspective, Iran’s military resistance against attacks by the United States and Israel cannot be analyzed solely through the lens of regime survival. At a deeper historical level, this conflict has become a confrontation between two competing visions of world order.
On one side stands a society that, from the Constitutional Revolution to the present, has struggled to give birth to a modern Iranian nation and to transcend archaic monarchical and colonial structures while projecting this political experience into the broader Middle East and Asia. On the other side stand forces represented today by global far-right movements, aggressive nationalism, and American-Israeli militarism.
In this sense, figures such as Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth do not embody the emancipatory modernity that emerged from the French revolutionary tradition. Rather, they signify the crisis and regression of some of the most reactionary right-wing currents resisting the achievements of modern civilization: multicultural societies, anti-colonialism, and opposition to militarism. This political current moves not toward universal republicanism but toward authority, permanent warfare, and the restoration of imperial logic. From this perspective, it is the Iranian nation that today represents the struggle for the establishment of a genuinely modern state in Iran and the broader dissemination of this vision.
Yet precisely in the midst of this crisis, segments of the monarchist opposition have once again demonstrated that their central concern is not liberty or popular sovereignty, but rather a return to power—even at the cost of aligning themselves with foreign pressure and war against the country. Just as sections of the French monarchist camp during the Franco-Prussian War viewed the defeat of their own country as a precondition for restoring the monarchy and welcomed the collapse of the young republic, some Iranian monarchists today similarly regard foreign attack, sanctions, and even national destruction as historical opportunities for the restoration of dynastic rule. In both cases, the issue is not defense of the nation, but exploitation of national crisis to revive an obsolete political order.
Passage Through a Deeply Contradictory Historical Situation
At the same time, it is essential to emphasize the central contradiction of Iran’s present condition: popular military defense of the country—even when led by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards—does not necessarily imply defense of the existing political order. Just as the French Revolution passed through the Napoleonic Empire without ending there, Iran’s continuous revolution must logically pass through the current stage of military resistance and ultimately transcend the Islamic Republic itself.
The contemporary role of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards should therefore not be interpreted as the final consolidation of a military-clerical order or the endpoint of Iran’s revolution. Rather, it constitutes part of the revolution’s historical contradiction: a force born from the Islamic Republic that, perhaps unintentionally, contributes to preserving the historical framework of the modern Iranian nation—a nation that may eventually move beyond the Islamic Republic itself and toward a Second Republic.
Within this framework, war, repression, economic crisis, and even the possible temporary return of authoritarian forces do not necessarily signify the defeat of the revolution. They may instead represent elements within the painful process of giving birth to a new historical order. Just as the French Revolution over the course of nearly a century and a half repeatedly suffered defeat, descended into bloodshed, devoured its own children, and rose again, Iranian society may likewise arrive at a new political order only through crises, wars, reversals, and major ruptures.
The fundamental question facing Iran is therefore not a return to the past, but a historical transition toward a new form of modern republicanism—a republic that may only truly emerge after the transcendence of the Islamic Republic itself, and which could ultimately be called the Second Republic.
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