Author Description

Methodologies and problématiques in social sciences and humanities are closely linked with the dominant ideologies in which they are produced, which, in turn, are deeply embedded in a specific social and economic formation. Thus, it is not a coincidence if, throughout the twentieth century, Turkish politics and society have been frequently analyzed through the lens of modernization. Generations of thinkers, politicians, social scientists, and historians have asked questions related to a presupposed transition from traditional to modern society in Turkey. Some of them supposed that the transition took place in the early republican period, in the 1920s and 30s, in an abrupt way, while it was a smooth, lengthy process, spanning from the late 18th to the late 20th century. Those idealizing the modernization and exaltating the modernizers were confronted by critiques of modernity; while the former camp was a heterogenous mixture of various political and historiographic tendencies, the latter was also far from being homogenous, and included both traditionist and post-modernist critical voices towards modernity. While differences of opinion and methodology within and between the modernist and anti-modernist tendencies are striking, there are also common denominators uniting them in a single narrative. According to this narrative, modernity consists of a set of references allegedly developed in Western Europe: Women's emancipation, bureaucratization of state apparatus, development of literacy and creation of a new education system, secularization in political references, anticlerical politics, transition towards a representative democracy, and many other developments are considered within a single, unitary process of (Western) development. Whig historians, Hegelian philosophers, and positivist thinkers praised this supposedly combined development as the March of Intellect, and late-19th century vitalism, culminating in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, condemned it as a uni