The social–policy environment reflects the nature of state society relations and the content of citizenship in any given country. The present article situates analysis of the Turkish modernization experience in a historical overview of perspectives on poverty and social policy during the republican period. In surprising contrast to the emphasis placed on etatism as the defining feature of state society relations in Turkey, this overview shows that the responsibility for social assistance assigned to and assumed by the political authority has remained very limited throughout the period under study. Until the 1980s, when the country adopted an outward–looking, market–oriented development strategy, several mechanisms that were hardly compatible with the logic of either state redistribution or market exchange substituted for formal social–assistance measures. Today social–policy approaches are in a position to deal with pressures generated by market forces. The social–policy outlook of the current ruling party, which comes from an Islamic political tradition, at times appears to be more in conformity with basic trends observed through capitalist modernization in Europe than with those of both Kemalist authoritarianism and the multiparty period preceding the transition to an open–market economy.