Although Qajar Iran’s despotic power structure left no room for civil society, intellectuals utilized their cultural capital and social networks to mediate between the state and society. Possessing social legitimacy and discursive power unlike official institutions, they shaped the discourse of reform and constitutionalism against traditional royal authority through the press, political associations, and intellectual circles. The question is how, within the historical context of the Qajar era, intellectuals managed to lay the foundations of the discourse and early structures of Iranian civil society, thereby influencing the transition from a despotic state to a constitutional government. The hypothesis posits that intellectuals—by allying with the clergy, establishing the press and parties, and formulating constitutionalist discourse—created civil society patterns against the despotic state and undermined royal legitimacy, paving the way for the transition to constitutional government. Employing Joel Migdal’s state-in-society theory and the process-tracing method, this article analyzes the interaction between the power structure and the agency of intellectuals at both institutional and discursive levels. The findings indicate that intellectuals, through press mechanisms such as the newspapers Akhtar and Qanun, institutional channels such as the Society of Adamiyat and the Revolutionary Committee, and alliances with the clergy, were able to organize civil demands in key events such as the Tobacco Protest. Their actions are considered among the first institutionalized efforts to lay the foundations of a modern civil society in Iran; however, in the post-Constitutional period, ideological disagreements and intra-group fractures cast a shadow over these achievements.