Faces of Republican Turkey: Beyond the Modernization Hypothesis

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DOI :10.26650/B/SS30.2020.004.06   IUP :10.26650/B/SS30.2020.004.06    Full Text (PDF)

The Bureaucracy and Its Discontents in Modern Turkey: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism and Anti-intellectualism

Cangül Örnek

An important pillar of Ottoman and Turkish capitalist modernization has been the constitution of a legal-rational

authority, which is strictly tied to the formation of a modern bureaucracy. The bureaucracy has attained a very special

attention in academic writing, getting far beyond considering this category as one of the elements of Turkish

modernization. Rather, the bureaucracy was declared as the very subject of this history, which acts according to a

special blueprint designed to shape the society and politics. The objective of this chapter is to challenge this

presumption by discussing the linkage between the thickening anti-intellectualism especially at the time of changes

in the mode of accumulation and the negative approach adopted against the bureaucracy by the political authorities,

which tend to establish an arbitrary rule. In this regard, it is asserted that the negative treatment of the traditional

Republican bureaucracy, which made a peak in the 1950s and, later, in the 1980s, cannot be explained in a superficial manner with only a reaction to the bureaucratization and the rise in bureaucratic formalities. These two waves of anti-bureaucratism require special attention also because of their legacy that contributed to the vital erosion in the institutional framework of the state administration in the 2000s. 


Keywords: Bureaucracy, modernization, anti-intellectualism, neo-liberalism, Turkey

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