ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the comparison of the methodology of Gramsci and Foucault deployed in their investigations into the nature of modernization and transition. The conception of modernity is supported and complemented by an elaboration of the notion of hegemony. Subsequently, the movement of the French Revolution is considered as the archetypical trajectory of modernity through a 'classic' formation of bourgeois hegemony. Gramsci's concept of modernity as a historical process did not entail a linear reconstruction of the present. Thomas's research on Gramsci's historicist methodology raised awareness about the epistemological status of his concepts and the ontological status of history as a dialectical, organic, and open totality. The offensive of the White Revolution pushed the clergy into opposition against the state, whereby the radical wing of Khomeini constituted the directive force. Khomeini sublated the internal and combined contradictions of the clergy's hybridity and the Shah's passive revolution through a Caesarist intervention.
