Power or the people: a comparison of the thoughts of Doğan Avcıoğlu and İdris Küçükömer regarding the intellectual climate of the 1960s

Abstract

In the thesis, the thoughts of Dogan Avcıoglu and İdris Küçükömer are compared by focusing mainly on their most prominent works of Türkiye’nin Düzeni (1968) by Avcıoglu, and Düzenin Yabancılasması: Batılasma (1969) by Küçükömer. The 1960s which was as a period between two military interventions in Turkish politics in 1960 and 1971 were a very fruitful era for leftist thought and movements. This decade started as a quest for orientation and ended with various political strategies to seize the power which could not be implemented. This thesis compares the thoughts of those two contradicting intellectuals in order to shed light on those intellectual and political activities which can and actually must be evaluated also as important parts of the history of Turkish intellectual life. The thoughts of both intellectual are compared on three important issues which were conceived as critical for the discussion era in the 1960s. These three points are the discussions on the Ottoman social order, the evaluation of the Turkish modernization and the evaluation of the relationship between politics and people. The main aim throughout the analysis is to define the essential characteristics of the thoughts on those issues and to show at the end of the analysis that all of the characteristics on different issues are interrelated and actually determine each other, which can give us a holistic picture both of the differentiation between Avcıoglu and Küçükömer and on the general condition in the decade. The main claim of the thesis is that: Dogan Avcıoglu tried to develop a power-centered analysis regarding the socio-political structure in Turkey, which left him with a momentary and temporary political strategy. However, İdris Küçükömer tried to develop a people- and society-centered analysis. Therefore, his approach had a forward-looking aspect which can be r