Turkish Social Political Economy History in the Light of Dugger’s Reconstructed Concepts of Veblenian Institutionalism

* Paper submitted for the forthcoming Special Issue of the Forum for Social Economics on “Dugger’s Concepts of Social and Institutional Economics: Power, Hegemony, Evolution, Inequality, Emulation and Abundance for a Values-Based and Participatory Economics” edited by Phillip O’Hara.

Abstract

As part of his quest to bring radicalism back into institutionalism, William M. Dugger has not only corrected the revisions made in Veblen’s original anarchist–socialist scheme after his death, but also produced a compelling social and political economy perspective that would conceive of capitalism as a mode of social provisioning run according to power and status, rather than price movements in the market. This paper attempts to contextualize Dugger’s reconstruction of the Veblenian dichotomy and Veblen’s radical institutionalism by focusing on the case of the politicization of engineers in Turkey in the 1960s and the 1970s.

Keywords:

• veblenian dichotomy
• harmony of interests
• enabling myths
• community’s joint stock of knowledge
• power
• status
• emulation
• corporations
• radicalism
• anarchist–socialism
• pragmatism
• businesspeople, business-state
• national establishment
• engineers in Turkey

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the two anonymous referees, Philip O’Hara, David Hill, and Sabri Öncü for their most valuable comments and suggestions. As the conventional disclaimer requires, all remaining errors are solely mine.

Notes

* Paper submitted for the forthcoming Special Issue of the Forum for Social Economics on “Dugger’s Concepts of Social and Institutional Economics: Power, Hegemony, Evolution, Inequality, Emulation and Abundance for a Values-Based and Participatory Economics” edited by Phillip O’Hara.

¹ Dugger (2006, p. 669) states here the following: “Only more time will tell if Veblen’s Engineers and the Price system was prophetic.” As we will see with respect to the Turkish case in the rest of this article, not only Veblen was right in his prediction of a possible “Soviet of Technicians,” but also Dugger is warranted in his accurate reading of Veblen’s this most misinterpreted work.

² This article, although traces Dugger’s many important contributions to radical institutionalism, does not attempt to offer a comprehensive theoretical survey of his concepts. For an excellent work that accomplishes this objective, see O’Hara (in press).

³ In this paper, I do not examine the transformations the UCTEA and its members went through in the aftermath of the 12 September 1980 coup d’état that ushered in the neoliberal reconstruction of Turkish society, economy and politics. For the developments in the post-1980s, see Köse and Öncü (2000, 2002), Balkan and Öncü (2015), and Öncü (2014, 2017b).

⁴ Historical time is one of the concepts Dugger uses in his works. Basically it refers to very long-term historical processes, especially involving changes in culture. For a thorough elaboration on the place of this concept in Dugger’s evolutionary institutionalism, see O’Hara (in press).

⁵ The rest of the paper is mostly abridged from Öncü (2003a). Unless necessary, no references are provided.