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The Ayatollah Khomeini exemplified a rare case of a genuine charisma in the modern time, which was, however, contaminated by rationality, impersonality, & accommodation to the modern bureaucratic & economic order. He increasingly used the mass media, particularly TV, for communicating with the masses. His charisma was also a dramaturgical phenomenon: it was created by symbolic representations in the Shi'ite community. Enjoying a leading position among the major social forces of civil society, including the bazaar-mosque alliance, the middle classes, intellectuals, & the popular classes, Khomeini managed to unify all under the canopy of his charismatic leadership & lead them to a victorious revolution. Khomeini, beginning with the victory of the revolution, was determined to place the repressive state apparatus under the control of his own lieutenants & confidants. The new men of power who conquered the huge state apparatus in postrevolutionary Iran share similar social origin, generational experience, educational background, & lifestyle; together, they form a "social status group" in Max Weber's sense of stand, which has a potential to develop into a social class. The members of the new class are young educated people who come predominantly from the traditional & modernizing petit bourgeois families. An emerging lay professional-bureaucratic intelligentsia, they are linked to the state apparatus in various capacities, & are less interested in revolutionizing the world than in matters of everyday life. They are more concerned with the Iranian nation-state than they are with an international Islamic republic or the export of the revolution: most advocate a normalization in foreign relations & reconstruction at home. AA

As exemplified in Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's leadership following the 1979 revolution.

The social formation of Iran in the nineteenth century was marked by the predominance of a precapitalist mode of production that had lasted for centuries. A semicolonial situation, superimposed upon Iranian society by the rival colonial powers in the latter half of the nineteenth century, however, set the stage for the beginnings of "modernization" along the lines of dependent capitalism. The result was an uneven and flawed development of capitalism, leading to the emergence and growth of a dual societal type in Iran.The dualistic character of any social formation in the transitional stage toward capitalism is attributed to the coexistence of several forms of precapitalist, as well as capitalist, modes of production.

The processes of development in the "Third World" are of great concern to historical sociologists and economic historians. However, despite the great interest displayed by the founding fathers of sociology in the nineteenth century in similar questions, and despite their historical orientation and liking of historical periodization, present day sociologists tend to be uninterested in both this subject matter and this orientation. In this respect they have lagged behind economists interested in questions of development and economic historians.Following in Marx & Weber's tradition of social-economic science the objective of this paper is to demonstrate the importance of historical analysis for a deeper understanding of the problem of economic development. From the outset tha basic question will be the proper use of history to construct the historical processes of development both in the past and the future.