Turkey Turkish Nationalism Ataturk Kurds
"Top hat Grey Wolf"
Turkey Turkish Nationalism Ataturk Kurds "Top hat Grey Wolf"
by Hugh Poulton
Synopsis
"What the future fortunes of [Gramsci's] writings will be, we cannot know. However, his permanence is already sufficiently sure, and justifies the historical study of his international reception. The present collection of studies is an indispensable foundation for this." Eric Hobsbawm, from the preface Antonio Gramsci is a giant of Marxian thought and one of the world's greatest cultural critics. Antonio A. Santucci is perhaps the world's preeminent Gramsci scholar. Monthly Review Press is proud to publish, for the first time in English, Santucci's masterful intellectual biography of the great Sardinian scholar and revolutionary. Gramscian terms such as "civil society" and "hegemony" are much used in everyday political discourse. Santucci warns us, however, that these words have been appropriated by both radicals and conservatives for contemporary and often self-serving ends that often have nothing to do with Gramsci's purposes in developing them. Rather what we must do, and what Santucci illustrates time and again in his dissection of Gramsci's writings, is absorb Gramsci's methods. These can be summed up as the suspicion of "grand explanatory schemes," the unity of theory and practice, and a focus on the details of everyday life. With respect to the last of these, Joseph Buttigieg says in his Nota: "Gramsci did not set out to explain historical reality armed with some full-fledged concept, such as hegemony; rather, he examined the minutiae of concrete social, economic, cultural, and political relations as they are lived in by individuals in their specific historical circumstances and, gradually, he acquired an increasingly complex understanding of how hegemony operates in many diverse ways and under many aspects within the capillaries of society." The rigor of Santucci's examination of Gramsci's life and work matches that of the seminal thought of the master himself. Readers will be enlightened and inspired by every page.
In recent years, nationalism has reasserted itself globally as a potent, mobilizing political force. In Turkey, the perilous state of politics--indeed the crisis of identity in the state itself--is a symptom of the rift between the secular and Islamic nationalists, (*) today the focus of intense and acrimonious debate. In The Top Hat, the Grey Wolf, and the Crescent, Hugh Poulton traces the evolution of nationalism in Turkey since the days of the Ottoman empire, through the rule of Attaturk when secularism became the binding force of a new national identity, to the present when a Western liberal middle class battles an increasingly powerful Islamic movement. Starting with an examination of nationalism as a political ideology, Poulton profiles in detail the main contenders in the battle for Turkey's identity: the Top Hat (secular nationalism), the Grey Wolf (the pan-Turkist fringe), and the Crescent (pro- Islamic forces). Poulton also considers the effects of Turkish nationalism on various minority groups, including the Kurds and the Alevis, and sheds lights on the nationalist sentiments of Turks outside Turkey.
Product Identifiers
ISBN-10 081476648X
ISBN-13 9780814766484
Key Details
Author Hugh Poulton
Number Of Pages 304 pages
Format Hardcover
Publication Date 1997-09-01
Language English
Publisher New York University Press
* TODAY (2013) THIS IS REFINED INTO 2 FALANGS:
1-Secular (Kemalists) Nationalists and 2-Islamistic (Fethullah/Milli Görüs/AKP) Nationalists
