Gökalp, Ziya
Gökalp, Ziya
Ziya Gökalp (1876–1924) was primarily responsible for introducing the study of sociology into Turkey, and he drew from sociology the intellectual basis for his ardent Turkish nationalism.
Born in Diyarbakir, the son of a civil servant who edited the official local newspaper, Mehmed Ziya (later Gökalp) attended secular schools there and also learned traditional Islamic lore from his uncle, a Muslim lawyer. At 18 he attempted suicide. By the following year, however, he was able to go to Istanbul and enroll at the Veterinary College.
He had already been influenced by the ideas of the Young Turks, and in 1895 he became a member of the secret society of Union and Progress in Istanbul. In 1898 he was arrested; after a year’s imprisonment he was banished to his native town, where he devoted all his time to study. In those years the Young Turks who were in exile in Paris were strongly influenced by French sociology. One of them, Prince Sabaheddin, a follower of Le Play, went so far as to declare that only through sociological studies could the Ottomans introduce social change and thus find a way to achieve harmony among the various elements in the empire, a view later supported by Gökalp (in the first issue of his newspaper, Peyman, August 28, 1909).
In 1908, after the Young Turk revolution, Gökalp became the representative of the Union and Progress party in Diyarbakir. The next year he was elected a member of the central council of the party at Salonica and given the task of expounding its doctrine and attracting young people to its ranks. In 1910 he received an appointment to teach sociology in Salonica, the first such appointment in Turkey, and five years later he became the first professor of sociology at the University of Istanbul. He taught in the faculty of letters until 1919, making it a center for studies of Turkey as a nation. Exiled to Malta after World War i, he returned to Diyarbakir in 1921 as a wholehearted supporter of Atatürk and edited the Küçük mecmua (“Little Review”), in which he wrote a series of sociological essays designed to instruct the national leaders. In 1922 he was appointed director of Cultural Publications in Ankara, a department of the Ministry of Public Education, and there published his famous Türkçülüg?ün essaslari (1923; “Foundations of Turkism”).
Gökalp believed that the political revolution of the Young Turks needed to be completed by a social revolution that would create a “new life” in such areas as economics, the family, fine arts, morality, and law. A new Turkish civilization could be created only by gaining knowledge of Turkey’s genuine national values. As late as 1911 he had believed that values are nothing but idées-forces based on philosophical considerations, but after 1912 he accepted the Durkheimian interpretation of values as collective representations. (He considered Durkheim to be the most penetrating sociologist and the founder of scientific sociology.) According to Gökalp, collective representations are realizations in the “collective consciousness,” which, when they become fully articulated, are called ideals. “The only source of values is society itself and the experience of collective sentiments by individuals constitutes collective conscience” ([1911-1923] 1959, pp. 62-64).
After her defeat in the Balkan War, a critical period began for Turkey. Discussions of reforms were accompanied by conflicts between the Islamists, Westernists, and Turkists. Gökalp, who had come to Istanbul in 1912, felt that these conflicts had to be reconciled in a broader outlook. He argued that humanity was composed of culture groups, each with its own value system, and of civilization groups, with rules and techniques capable of intercultural diffusion and universal acceptance ([1911— 1923] 1959, pp. 97-101). It was sociologically valid that Turks belonged at the same time to the Turkish nation, to the Muslim religious community, and to European civilization (Gökalp [1911-1923] 1959, pp. 71-76; Heyd 1950, pp. 149-151). Increasingly Gökalp stressed nationalism as the most powerful ideal of the modern age and nations as the most highly developed species on the scale of culture groups. In the nation he thought it was possible to integrate Turkish culture, Islam, and Western techniques. He later came to identify collective representations with national mores and asserted that “the …[discipline] which studies how the culture of a nation is distinguished from the civilization to which it belongs is called cultural sociology” ([1911-1923] 1959, pp. 172-173).
Following his belief that the task of the sociologist is to discover the elements of national culture, he embarked on a series of studies on the evolution of the Turkish family and on the pre-Islamic Turkish religion and state. His idea of a modernized Islam was predicated on the theory that the part of the religious law of Islam that is based on consensus is of social rather than divine origin and may therefore change in accordance with secular change ([1911-1923] 1959, pp. 193-196). He was convinced that a national state must be a secular one, and he strongly advocated a national system of education and economy. His programs for secularizing both education and the judiciary and for introducing equal rights for women were partly put into effect in 1917–1918.
Opinion on Gökalp is divided. He himself thought that what was original about his work was his testing of Durkheim’s sociological method by applying it to Turkish civilization. His supporters agree that his conceptualizations of the nature of culture and nation are original and that his work represents scientific sociology in the Durkheim tradition; his critics stress that he had a dogmatic and deductive mind with strong collectivist ideas. Above all, he was an impassioned nationalist, and there is no doubt that his teachings provided an intellectual foundation for the modernization of Turkey.
Haul ?nalcik
[For the historical context of Gökalp’s work, seeIslam; Nationalism; Pan Movements; and the biographies ofDurkheim; Le Play.]
WORKS BY GÖKALP
(1911–1923) 1959 Turkish Nationalism and Western Civilization: Selected Essays. Translated and edited with an introduction by Niyazi Berkes. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
(1923) 1940 Türkçülü?ün essaslar? (“Foundations of Turkism”). Istanbul: Arkadas Matbaas?.
Külliyat. 2 vols. Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Bas?mevi, 1952–1965. ? Volume 1: Sürler ve halk masallari. Volume 2: Ziya Gökalp’m mektuplan.
Ziya Gökalp’in ilk yazi hayati, 1894-1909: Do?umu’nun 80. yildönümü münasebetiyle. Istanbul: Diyarbakiri Tamtma Dernegi, 1956.
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Heyd, Uriel 1950 Foundations of Turkish Nationalism: The Life and Teachings of Ziya Gökalp. London: Luzac.
TÜtengil, Cavit O. 1949 Ziya Gökalp Rakk?nda bir bibliyografya denemesi. Istanbul: Berksoy Matbaasi?.
Ülken, Hilmi ZiyaZiya Gökalp. Istanbul: Kanaat Kitavebi. ? Date of publication not ascertained.
Z?y?al-D?n, Fakhr? 1935 Ziya Gökalp, sa vie et sa sociologie: Essai sur I’influence de la sociologie francaise enTurquie. Nancy (France): Berger-Levrault.