The Quest for a New Paradigm or the Insight from Historical Sociology

This article responds to İlker Aytürk’s quest for a post-post-Kemalist paradigm in Turkish studies, originally published in 2015. It starts by discussing some potential merits of Aytürk’s initiative, as it might open the way for a critical attitude to the automatisms of certain epistemic communities. Then it offers a series of criticisms of the paradigmatic shift proposal. The first criticism is that the paradigmatic shift proposal interprets the literature by constructing a post-Kemalist ideal type placing a diverse group of academics in the same pre-determined category despite stark differences in their methods, levels of analysis, their ways of generalizations. The second criticism underlines that the paradigmatic shift proposal is unfair to the literature when it portrays the existing scholarship as inattentive to the factors that gave birth to the Unionism and Kemalism, respectively. Moreover, it argues that the paradigmatic shift proposal privileges an unusual way of doing longue durée analysis, establishing an unwarranted causal link between the modern tutelage problem and Seljuks, Göktürks, and other historical political entities, in order to downplay the role of Kemalist elites on tutelage. Against this approach, this article suggests adapting insights from historical sociology, and more specifically Charles Tilly’s perspective, and it highlights the role of war in state-building, namely the impact of the war decade of 1912-1922. Third, the claim that post-Kemalism paved the way for regime change after 2007 is interpreted here as an overestimation of the power of an academic perspective. Additionally, it is emphasized that the tone of the language with respect to past episodes of collective violence should comply with academic rigor. All in all, this article suggests reflecting on the possibilities of new research agendas to understand how the macro projects of the state intersect with social reality and thinking about the gradual transformation of studies on Turkey, by taking seriously the space that ...