Original publication: “Ateş Uslu ile Son Çıkan Kitabı ‘Siyasal Düşüncelerin Toplumsal Tarihi’ Üstüne Söyleşi”, Toplumsal Tarih, No. 336, 2021, pp. 8-12.
Translation generated by AI.
First of all, let’s hear the story of this book from you, if you like…
Every book has a multi-layered story, and this one is no exception. It took me four years to write; during this time, I focused almost exclusively on this work, and many of my students might say I neglected them because of it. Looking at it from a broader perspective, I’ve been giving various courses in the field of intellectual history for over a decade. We can also talk about my interest in the history of political thought, which began when I started university. In summary, I can say that these books emerged as the result of a twenty-year dream, ten years of teaching, and a four-year writing process.
Let’s start with the oldest part. One of my favorite courses at Galatasaray University was the history of political thought. My professor, Alexandre Toumarkine, taught this course in an extremely comprehensive and systematic way; we used to discuss with him and other friends what was missing in this field and what could be done methodologically. In fact, I can say these books are a result of what I did with my friends and professors from those days. Political science, philosophy, and history intersect in the field of political thought, where the “historical” dimension often remains in the background. My approach to this field using historical methodology was greatly influenced by Toumarkine, a historian himself, and by the books of historians like Jean Touchard, whom I read during my undergraduate years due to Toumarkine’s influence.
The courses I’ve given over the past eleven years, both at the university and outside, shaped the core ideas of this book. These courses also led me to ask how we should approach intellectual history and how I personally approach it. During that time, I also published a book on the methodology of this subject: Introduction to the History of Political Thought: Historiography, Key Approaches, and Research Methods, published in 2017 by Tarih Vakfı Yurt Publishing. It was a book in which I tried to answer the questions: “How has the history of political ideas been written before?” and “How can it be written from now on?” Naturally, questions like “Well professor, how would you write it yourself?” followed. I had already been considering turning my lecture notes into a book, and this idea gradually materialized. Finally, after a difficult four-year period filled with the pandemic and many other challenges, I managed to complete the writing process.
We can consider the book both as a textbook and as a reference source for academics and general readers, since my main goal was to provide them with a roadmap for lectures, research, or general reading. But in fact, every book is written as much for oneself as for others. This is perhaps even more pronounced in this book; within the depth of the theoretical topics covered and the diversity of concepts, it is very easy to get lost. I tried to develop a clear and systematic narrative to find my way together with the readers through these rich topics. The lectures I gave helped with this to some extent: in order to ensure good comprehension of the topics, I sometimes organized my lectures with almost schematic precision. The “architecture” of the book is based on the outlines, chapter titles, and sections of those lectures. Of course, it’s not that simple: during the first year of writing, I spent almost the entire time just detailing the outline and kept making changes to the table of contents and titles right up to the final days.
There are numerous works, both nationally and internationally, that address this subject, many of which have been used as textbooks at universities for years. How would you define the distinctiveness and contribution of this work to the field and its related questions?
I think the contribution of this book to the field can be summarized in several points. From what I have seen, one key feature that has been frequently highlighted in social media and various review articles is its broad scope. I understand why this breadth surprises people in today’s academia: after all, specialization in a particular subject and publishing only on that topic is highly valued in universities. While such specialization can indeed lead to valuable research, when academic production becomes limited to that, we lose sight of a holistic view. And by holistic view, I don’t even mean an interdisciplinary approach or a view encompassing the whole of natural and social reality; we can no longer even look at our own disciplines as a whole. First and foremost, we forget to rewrite textbooks. As a result, a discrepancy arises between the articles and books written on specialized topics and the textbooks used in classes, including in the field of the history of political thought. New topics are tackled in articles and monographs, new insights are offered, but these innovations rarely reflect in textbooks or teaching; the new literature is almost ignored, and we sometimes repeat the same narratives that date back to the 1930s. I think this is where the originality of this book lies.
Moreover, in textbooks, we generally aim to present a dense and comprehensive coverage of topics in as few pages as possible; heavy footnoting is usually avoided. Also, some basic information in certain fields becomes so entrenched that it is no longer questioned. I tried not to follow this path. I read as many primary sources (works of the thinkers themselves) and as much literature as possible for every topic I covered. I researched the original contexts of well-known aphorisms in classical texts, and sometimes had to spend days researching just to use a single word correctly. Returning to primary sources was enlightening for me as well, as I, like everyone else, had some ingrained assumptions — certain expressions and ideas I kept hearing and repeating in the field of political thought. By going directly back to primary sources, I realized that some of these assumptions were wrong. For example, Aristotle is often cited as having used the phrase zoon politikon (political animal) in several places in his Ethics and Politics. Another claim is that he used the phrase zoon logon echon (a being possessing logos), which has been repeated, probably since Heidegger, in almost every book. However, when we examine Aristotle’s corpus, we do not encounter such a phrase. It is true that for Aristotle the capacity for logos is fundamental, but he does not explicitly use the phrase zoon logon echon. Returning to the original sources helped me notice many such details.
Of course, the primary sources differ greatly between, say, ancient Mesopotamian thought, early 20th-century Ottoman-Turkish thought, and 16th-century French thought. Each required a different method of source criticism, and I paid special attention to this. The literature is also extremely important. For each subject—be it Mesopotamian thought, ancient Greek thought, ancient Roman thought, or early 20th-century Ottoman-Turkish thought—there is an immense body of scholarly work. I tried to build the chapters around as much up-to-date literature as possible and to diversify my interpretations accordingly. For all these reasons, there are numerous footnotes on each page, and at the end of each chapter, I included a list of the primary sources and literature I could access related to the period and topic covered. I hope this allows readers interested in further research to gain an idea of the richness of the sources and bibliography.
When I look at the comments on social media, I also see that the spatial diversity of the topics addressed in the book has been highlighted. I can confirm that this is another originality. A historiography of political thought that is not limited to Europe and North America but also includes Asia, the Americas, and Africa is gradually developing; these approaches are usually being referred to as “comparative history of political thought” and “global intellectual history.” We can think of this book as a contribution to this emerging literature. Meanwhile, I have taken care not to draw sharp distinctions between “West” and “East” in the book. Instead of dedicating separate chapters to Islamic, Indian, or Chinese thought, I tried to trace them within a framework of synchronicity. Although each chapter focuses on a particular geographical area and associated intellectual trends, I resolutely sought to answer how ideas were developing in different regions during the same periods.
A textbook is usually designed to provide students with factual and conceptual knowledge about a subject. For this reason, theoretical and methodological concerns are often treated as secondary in such works. Contrary to this general approach, it is evident that your book is shaped by a central problematique that governs the entire work. Could you define these methodological concerns and explain their importance in understanding the history of political thought in a holistic way?
I believe it is not possible to write such works unless they are based on a specific line of inquiry: a book with broad scope but no problematique inevitably becomes a cumbersome heap of information. In this book, while I examine works of political thought within a social framework, I try to make class-based exploitation and patriarchal domination visible. Liberal historiographical approaches dominate the historiography of political thought. While I acknowledge that this approach contributes to the understanding of concepts like liberty and equality, I also believe it has major shortcomings. My book can be considered as an alternative reading to that. As I stated in detail in the introduction, the main problematique—or series of problematiques—of the book is based on a historical materialist inquiry and materialist feminism. This is, of course, a conscious choice. All of us, whether writing a textbook or an academic article, inevitably make similar choices: we choose among historiographical schools, among various scientific research methods. I think it is an act of intellectual honesty to declare those choices explicitly from the outset.
During the writing process, some of my students asked, “But professor, won’t you be criticized for this approach? Aren’t you afraid of being accused of writing in a biased way or of interpreting history from only one perspective?” I smile when I remember these questions. Historians who adopt mainstream historiographical schools are rarely accused of one-sidedness or reductionism, whereas Marxist or feminist historians begin their work knowing that they will have to face such accusations from the outset. But even those who adopt the most empiricist methods can fall into traps of reductionism or bias without realizing it. I don’t believe my reading of history in this book is one-sided. On the contrary, after making this methodological choice, I broadened the range of primary sources and literature I used as much as possible: the bibliography includes works from all schools of thought. On topics that are already widely discussed, I give a little more space to Marxist or feminist literature.
Of course, adopting a historical materialist approach to intellectual history also required making other choices. In some areas, there already exists a strong tradition of historical materialist historiography of political thought; for example, the books of Ellen Meiksins Wood (From Citizens to Lords and Liberty and Property) come to mind. I benefited greatly from Indian Marxists like Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, and it was exciting for me to discover works by Thai Marxists, who are not well known. But I also engaged critically with most of them. From this perspective, there was no single approach that I accepted without question throughout the book. I don’t take Marxism as a model offering ready-made answers about reality, but rather as a method. In some areas, I had to develop my own contributions. For example, in the case of Islamic political thought, we cannot speak of a satisfactory Marxist approach. In such cases, I tried to apply the historical materialist method to develop my own approach.
This question probablyrequires a very broad and long answer,but perhaps you could answer it briefly: What do you see as the biggest difference between your work and other narratives of “modern intellectual history”?
In Turkey, the historiography of ideas is especially dominated by a progressive-modernist approach. Originating in the 19th century, this view treats concepts and phenomena such as modernization, humanism, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and rationalism as nearly synonymous and sees their development as steps in humanity’s great march forward. Even Marxists often tell the same story as mainstream historians in this regard: celebrating a heroic bourgeoisie (and its political thinkers) that fought against the darkness of feudal medieval times with liberty and reason. Sometimes, thinkers in the Middle Ages who defended rational thought and were ultimately overwhelmed by darkness are portrayed as tragic heroes. I addressed the concepts and movements I just mentioned in their specific historical contexts and emphasized that humanism and the Enlightenment are movements that developed in different periods and, in some aspects, even conflicted. I also reminded readers that rationalism has a long history that predates the Enlightenment by centuries. Moreover, I tried not to attribute an inherently positive or negative meaning to any of these concepts, and to maintain a critical stance.
To give examples from Islamic thought: it is known that thinkers such as Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes developed rationalist interpretations of philosophy. In the progressive-modernist perspective I mentioned earlier, rationalism is attributed with progressiveness and critical thinking, and as rationalism is believed to have declined, the Islamic world is said to have plunged into darkness and fanaticism. Instead of attributing critical thinking to these philosophers merely because they were rationalists, I tried to place them within their societal contradictions and conflicts. For instance, one of the conclusions I reached is that thinkers like Farabi and Avicenna could be seen among the ideological representatives of the ruling class of their time. I see that this view is rarely expressed except by a few Arab Marxist researchers. Another example: Al-Ghazali is often criticized for opposing rationalism and for causing the rationalist tradition in Islam to be curtailed. But in my book, I criticize Al-Ghazali not for being anti-rationalist, but rather for his efforts to legitimize political power and suppress criticism of the ruling class.
Engaging critically with the rationalist Enlightenment tradition also brings a certain risk: some thinkers and historians, while criticizing the modern/capitalist understanding of rationality, tend to idealize pre-modern eras as a sort of Golden Age. This deeply troubles me. While it is argued that the Enlightenment was not actually such a glorious era—that it was plagued by issues like domination over nature and the deification of reason—it is also implied or directly claimed that pre-modern periods allowed ambiguity and that various forms of domination only became entrenched with modernity. I tried to avoid this narrative as well, and instead emphasized that patriarchy and class society existed in every historical period, and that the political ideas of each era were marked by different forms of class exploitation and male domination.
I almost never used the term “modern” in the book: this alone will surprise many of my colleagues, since there is a widespread habit of interpreting the entire history of political thought as a process leading toward modern thought. I believe many of the features commonly attributed to “modernity” are actually characteristics of capitalism. Reframing the process in these terms was enlightening for me personally. Telling the story through the lens of “modernization” tends to obscure the historical specificity of diverse phenomena—such as the Reformation, Renaissance, or Romanticism—by collapsing them under a single heading, and also leads to culturalist interpretations. I am of the view that capitalism is a more historically grounded and specific concept than modernity. Another issue with the concept of modernity arises in the context of non-Western societies. The entire 19th and 20th centuries are often told as a story of tension between efforts at modernization and resistance to it in these societies and among their intellectuals. It is true that there was such tension during this period, and that many societies were engaged in debates about “Westernization,” “civilization,” or “modernization.” But I interpreted these debates in the Ottoman Empire, Japan, or China in the 19th century as discussions among the ruling classes of those countries about how to adopt certain dimensions of capitalism. The desire to “adopt the technology of the West while preserving the morality of the East” was perhaps really the desire to adopt capitalist technology (and economy) while preserving pre-capitalist ideologies.
In fact, I am also tracing a kind of progressive tradition in the book—but instead of identifying it through modernization and rationality, I consider the equality and freedom demands of women, slaves, and workers—many of whom are now forgotten—as the real progressive tradition.
A question that everyone, and especially students, often ask: Why do we read these names and not allow others to be part of this grand narrative? How did you construct the “canon” of this intellectual history?
As I mentioned at the beginning of our interview, this question struck me when I first took this course twenty years ago: Why are we reading these men, and not others? I say “men” deliberately, because all of the thinkers deemed worthy of being read were men. I was somewhat lucky—Toumarkine, being a historian attentive to detail, included some works from outside the canon. Also, Cemal Bâli Akal, in both the courses I attended as a guest and in his book The Birth of Modern Thought: The Spanish Golden Age, emphasized that there were very important thinkers outside the canon. Of course, Marxist and feminist theory had already begun influencing my questioning of the canon back then: even those who had no access to reading and writing, or whose works were dismissed as unimportant or even dangerous, developed political views—and it was necessary to discover them.
While preparing Introduction to the History of Political Thought, I had the opportunity to examine many textbooks published since the early 19th century, when this discipline first emerged, and I saw how the canon had changed over time. One doesn’t need to look far—even when looking at the evolution of the anthology The History of Political Thought in the West: Selected Writings, edited by Mete Tuncay, one can see that the canon has changed in different periods. All this showed me that the canon is changeable, and perhaps should be changed. Yes, there are great thinkers, but we should perhaps rethink and question repeatedly who is considered a great thinker and who has been more influential. I wrote A Social History of Political Thought without being bound by the canon: the flow of the book proceeds through historical periods, not names. Naturally, not every thinker is allocated the same number of pages in the book. Some are mentioned in just half a sentence, while others, like Plato and Aristotle, have dedicated chapters—because they deserve it. Their works are crucial for understanding the political thought of their time, they have influenced many other thinkers for centuries, and we still discuss them today. We can’t afford to remove them from the canon. But by broadening our perspective and area of investigation, we can begin to question some of our ingrained assumptions. Many great thinkers did not invent concepts, but instead elaborated on ideas that were already being debated in their time. For example, no historian of thought would deny that Locke developed a political theory centered on liberty, but if we look at other writers of his era, we find many thinkers—some of them women—who reflected on liberty just as strikingly as he did.
There are other problems with the canon as well. Sometimes we forget that thinkers excluded from the canon have made fundamental contributions to political theory. When I told a colleague whose intellectual opinions I greatly respect that I had just left a lecture on Leibniz’s political thought, their reaction was, “Leibniz was a political thinker?” Yet if you examine his writings, you can find enormous political contributions alongside his work in ontology and epistemology—but these are often ignored. Moreover, each discipline has its own canon, which usually complicates the work of intellectual historians. Weber is considered a great sociologist, and Adam Smith is a staple of economic thought. But the more we force them into those disciplinary molds, the harder it becomes to read them in light of their contributions to other areas. As I also pointed out in the book, we can certainly consider Weber and Smith as political thinkers as well.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to get a book on history of political thought that doesn’t revolve around a standard list of ten or twelve thinkers accepted by the academic community. I know that many of my colleagues will not consider A Social History of Political Thought a genuine work on the history of political thought. They’ll likely see the first volume as a history of civilization, the third as a kind of political history, and the second perhaps as a mixture of both. But I insist that a book on history of political thought like this can be written—and in fact, there are examples of it in international literature. The Cambridge History of Political Thought series is a good example of writing intellectual history without being limited by the canon.
Lastly, I’d like to ask whether there will be a continuation of this work. Despite its broad scope and detailed narrative, your book ends in the early twentieth century. Do you plan to extend this study into the twentieth century in the coming years?
Working on this book for four years had several effects. First of all, I truly enjoyed it (“had fun” would not be an exaggeration). It was a great feeling to rediscover that excitement after my doctoral thesis. But it also had an exhausting effect: reading Hegel’s Philosophy of Right in the morning, reviewing late Byzantine poetry on the way, and then spending the afternoon in the library searching for a clue about the class foundations of Confucian thinkers’ debates in 17th-century Korea inevitably wears you out. As I continued writing, the number of volumes increased, but I had already decided early on to bring the narrative only up to the early 20th century. For now, I am not planning to write another volume. Instead, I prefer to keep these three volumes alive and current by making additions whenever I access sources and contemporary literature I had not previously encountered.