A Critical Perspective on Turkish Modernization and Structure of Society: İdris Küçükömer

Author/s: Mehmet Güven Avcı

Year: 2019 Vol: 1 Number: 2

Abstract

İdris Küçükömer comes across as an important intellectual in the post-1960s, when a significant movement in intellectual life was experienced in Turkey along with social and political life. Küçükömer, who like many intellectuals of the period advocated social change centered on bureaucracy and the military and considered the importance of the relationship through formations within the military, centered on the concept of civil society by abandoning the junta-based understanding in the second half of the 1960s. This quest, which began with the question of why a civil society in the Western sense was not within the Turkish social structure, opened the way to Küçükömer’s re-handling and re-examining of Turkish social and political history at the center of this concept. This initiative of Küçükömer also carries the quality of a critical look at the bureaucracy-centered modernization process of Turkey from one side. This study is the effort to examine İdris Küçükömer’s views on the Turkish modernization process. İdris Küçükömer is an important resource in discussions to be made on Turkish modernization and social structure from the perspective of his approach to the issue in terms of civil society. He researched the reasons for the lack of civil societies and lack of emerging class issues in Turkey, and posed very important questions to the history of Turkey on this topic. This critique, which comes particularly from within leftist thought on the Western and bureaucratic structure of Turkey’s process of modernization and social change, has the quality of being a herald for many discussions these days.

Keywords
modernization, change, bureaucracy, military, civil society