Once there was and once there wasn’t: the tale of intellectuals and the state in Turkey

Abstract

This article presents a taxonomy of various conceptions of the intellectual and then analyses the changing official discourse on intellectuals in Turkey with reference to this taxonomy. The taxonomy developed here is an original contribution to the existing literature on intellectuals. It distinguishes six conceptions of the intellectual: (i) as the gadfly and the gift of god, (ii) as the philosopher, (iii) as parrhesiastes, (iv) as the activist, (v) as the exile and (vi) as the persona non grata. During the single-party years, the dominant approach oscillated between the intellectual as gadfly, God’s gift and philosopher; during the 1960s and 1970s, it was replaced by a conception of the intellectual as the activist; during the aftermath of the 1980 coup d’état, the intellectual was the exile. During the 1990s and 2000s, the intellectuals were mainly the critics of the hegemonic Kemalism, thus they were the epitomisation of parrhesia. This study argues that variations within the official discourse on intellectuals give important clues about how a hegemonic configuration is installed/challenged/displaced/replaced/re-installed, and since the current hegemony in Turkey stands on anti-intellectualism, the intellectual is now persona non grata.

Keywords:

• Intellectuals
• anti-intellectualism
• hegemony
• parrhesia
• populism

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See for instance Schumpeter (1942), Lipset (1959), Boggs (1993), Mannheim (1993), Karabel (1996).

2 By religio-conservative neoliberal hegemony I mean specifically the hegemonic constellation built by the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi – AKP) which has been in power since 2002. Announcing itself as a ‘conservative democrat’ party, the AKP came to power with a liberal–pluralist agenda claiming to further the democratisation of the country. In time, however, its discourse turned into an agenda of both Islamisation and polarised politicisation of socio-cultural life, accompanied by authoritarianism.

3 This conception is reminiscent of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophers’ endeavour to start all over again in terms of the way we think and behave, in terms of the creation of a new society, politics, culture, and eventually a new world. This implied that the whole of humanity should be turned into a tabula rasa as the first step of moving forward.

4 Since an English translation of Plaidoyer pour les Intellectuels of Jean Paul Sartre is not available, the Turkish translation is used and translated by the author in this article: Aydınlar Üzerine, trans. Aysel Bora (İstanbul: Can, 1997).

5 For further elaboration on the state and intellectuals during this period, see Altınkaş (2011).

6 After coming to power in 2002, the AKP was re-elected in 2007 and in 2011. These three consecutive terms of their rule were later referred to by the party’s leader Erdoğan as a passing from apprenticeship to craftsmanship and then to mastery.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Funda Gençoğlu

Funda Gencoglu received her BA and MA degrees from Bilkent University, and her PhD from METU. She currently lectures on political theory and Turkish politics at Atilim University. For a few years she has been writing about intellectuals and anti-intellectualism in Turkey. Previously, she published on the discontents of democracy in Turkey by focussing on various issues including the discrimination against women, LGBTIQ+, the Roma population, and the Kurds; civil society; social democracy; constitution making; conscientious objection; and the influence of the early republican period over the contemporary politics in Turkey. She has also written some theoretical articles on public reason, ethics, agonistics, anti-intellectualism, populism, posthumanism and subjectivity.