The central aim of my paper is to delineate a kind of intellectual zeitgeist haunting the Iranian landscape and, arguably, informing the political development of what was to become the revolution of 1979. My central argument in this paper is that, in much of the modern Iranian literature preceding the ‘79 revolution, political sovereignty is characterized as an absolute and totalizing force against which the figure of the revolutionary is posited as the privileged site of individual agency. To begin with, I have isolated two dominant conceptualizations of how some key authors characterize political sovereignty in Iran: as the unmitigated will and whim of the sovereign (texts: Bozorg Alavi’s Her Eyes and Scrap Papers from Prison; speeches by Ayatollah Khomeini); and sovereignty located through assignation of culpability (texts: Alavi’s texts cited earlier; Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s Occidentosis and The School Principal; Khomeini’s various speeches; Sadeq Hedayat’s Haji Agha). Set against totalizing narratives of power, we find few outlets for agency in many of these writings. Though the “Iranian people” are evoked constantly, there is virtually no accounting of individual agency within this static invocation of the masses. There is little discussion of how ordinary individuals move within the existent institutional structures, nor about how configurations of power are mitigated regularly in small, commonplace ways. What we do find, however, is the representation of resistance as thoroughly exceptional and as the vocation of a few select individuals. I will outline a series of multi-layered and interpenetrating tropes that operate around the figure of the revolutionary as the hero par excellence: the revolutionary as intellectual; the revolutionary as morally upright; the intellectual as necessarily male. Through these delineations, I argue that because the revolutionary is singularly situated against the machinery of the state, the very possibility of emancipation remains categorically intertwined with him. That is to say, in setting up a strict binary between the revolutionary and the state, many of these texts seem to posit the revolutionary as an idealized countersovereignty. Yet because we don’t often find in these writings the delineation of a force which is projected to replace the power of the state, the result is a literature which aggrandizes the revolutionary-agent who labors to overturn the power of the sovereign, but who is not projected to represent an alternative mode of institutional sovereignty.