Description
Barrington Moore focuses to explore the origins of dictatorship and democracy with some cases like Germany or Japan in his well-known book, ‘Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy’. Indeed, Turkey’s early Republican period under the Mustafa Kemal’s regime may become a case for Moore’s thesis. Following the abolishment of the Caliphate, Mustafa Kemal’s regime began a social and cultural revolution in order to achieve civilisation and the Westernisation process. Mustafa Kemal and his associates aimed at transforming all the cultural and symbolic aspects associated with the Islamic way of life, including equal rights for women, reforming the language, and the creation of a new national and cultural identity, that of being Turkish. However, Mustafa Kemal changed the direction from a reformist liberal approach to militant and authoritarian secularism and modernisation process due to the lack of bourgeoisie in Turkey.
Indeed, Kemalist modernisation process may become Moore’s one of the cases such as Germany and Japan in terms of the capitalist reactionary and authoritarian routes in modernisation process. However, Moore’s approach can be expanded as AKP’s and Erdogan’s history with regards to the last part of Moore’s book and his point of Catonism. Moore focuses economic relations between the classes in order to explain the modernisation process of the countries and economy is one of the most important indicators for democratic or authoritarian states. Moore rejects the assumption that the behavior of a class in any particular situation is determined by the "economic factor" rather than the "religious factor" or the "diplomatic factor." Social class is the unit of analysis, but in its cultural, ideological, and political concreteness, not only in terms of its members' abstract economic interests. However, in the last part of his book, he mentions the conservative or radical imagery for understanding the origins of dictatorship. According to Moore, radical and conservative rhetoric help to control the whole country within the authoritarian regimes. Moore gives a very good example from the Ancient Rome’s political figure, ‘Cato the Elder’ to explain this phenomenon and this research tries to engage Catonism with AKP’s policy under the Erdogan’s leadership.
