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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Robert F. Spencer
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota

Extract

An interesting question raised by the foregoing study is the extent to which pre-Kemalist Turkey offered a status quo. Did the Ottoman dynasty and its associated bureaucracy seek to maintain a stasis throughout its domains and to resist the inroads of change from without? If so, there is then the contrast, following the suggestions made by Deutsch, with the Kemalist revolution where an avid quest for innovation became the keynote. It is of course true that one tends to be so impressed by the social revolution engineered by Kemal Atatiirk, one of the most dramatic figures of modern political history, that the antecedents of the radical changes in Turkey following World War I are all but forgotten. Clearly, if Atatiirk was successful in changing the face of Turkey, it was on the basis of what had gone before.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1961

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References

1 Cf. Heyd, Uriel, Foundations of Turkish Nationalism (London, 1950);Google ScholarSpencer, Robert F., “Culture Process and Intellectual Current: Durkheim and Atatiirk”, American Anthropologist, 60 (1958), pp. 640657. French influence in Turkey arose largely because of the Revolution of 1789 and the fact that French officers were employed by the sultans to westernize the imperial army. French thought, particularly that of the social philosophers, came to have a marked influence on the Turks, such figures as Tarde, Comte, LeBon, Fouillée, and especially Durkheim offering a rationale for the Kemalist revolution.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Anderson, J. N. D., Islamic Law in the Modern World (New York, 1959), pp. 1–16.Google Scholar

3 Thomas Francis Carter, The Invention of Printing in China and its Spread Westward, 2nd ed. (New York, 1955), pp. 150154.Google Scholar