How can we account for dynamics of unrest and social change in post-revolutionary Iran? A supposed "rentier" state, social cleavages and coalitions have been in flux since the 1979 Revolution. The trajectory of social change in Iran challenges the common portrayals of its state-society relations as subsumable under a rubric of clientelism or populism. The rentier concept dominates conceptions of the country's political economy, nowhere more so than in the internal democratic factions of the elite and the social movements that surround them. This ideal-type of a state free from the "resource curse" lurks in almost every analysis of the country's politics and history. Yet this characterization belies the reality of contentious politics in Iran, given that the unruly middle classes who spearheaded 2009's oppositional Green Movement are as embedded, if not moreso, in resource flows from the government as the urban poor and rural semi-proletariat. I argue that, instead of a politics of production that leads us into the blind alley of "rentierism," we can better comprehend post-1979 social change by looking at the politics of distribution. Adapting the historical sociology of welfare states, I analyze changes in state-society relations in Iran through the conceptual apparatus of "welfare regimes," particular configurations of social policy that de-commodify daily life and are intertwined with a country's political economy and state formation. Iran currently possesses dual welfare regimes: a corporatist-conservative welfare regime inherited from the Pahlavi era, and a revolutionary welfare regime that arose in 1979 and solidified during the Iran-Iraq war. Using local government reports, archival documents, interviews with welfare administrators in Iran, and ethnography at several sites in Tehran and other cities, I show how social cleavages and grievances in Iran are conditioned by the state's mix of social policy. I also argue, however, that social policy played a key and unobserved role in empowering the "new class" which became the vocal center of Iran's vibrant democracy movements.