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Eren Duzgun, "Capitalism, Jacobinism and International Relations: Revisiting Turkish Modernity" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Eren Duzgun, "Capitalism, Jacobinism and International Relations: Revisiting Turkish Modernity" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
ratings:
Length:
100 minutes
Released:
Dec 28, 2022
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
Western interpretations of the Ottoman age of reform and the Turkish Republic often evaluate these histories against an idealized, essentialized narrative of the European history, in which a triumphant bourgeois class instigated transitions to political liberalism and capitalism. Consequently, their explanations of persistent authoritarian tendencies and statist economic development policies focus on what features of European modernity are missing or insufficiently present in Turkey.
In Capitalism, Jacobinism and International Relations: Revisiting Turkish Modernity (Cambridge UP, 2022), Eren Duzgun, argues that this approach to comparative historical analysis not only fails to grasp Ottoman and Turkish history on its own terms, but it also gets European history wrong by overlooking the variety of trajectories of political and economic development that characterized European history from the age of revolutions onwards. Duzgun argues that the concept of Jacobinism holds the key to understanding both Ottoman and Turkish modernization and transitions to modernity in continental Europe that did not correspond to the narrative of ‘bourgeois revolutions’ that undergirds both liberal and Marxist theories of modernization. We will discuss the origins of the Jacobin route to modernity, how the Jacobin model relates to common understandings of capitalist political economies, and why a book about Turkish and Ottoman history needed a chapter on French history.
Eren Duzgun is assistant professor of international relations at the University of Nottingham’s China Campus in Ningbo, China.
Geoffrey Gordon is a PhD candidate in comparative politics at the University of Virginia. Follow him on Twitter: @geofflgordon.
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In Capitalism, Jacobinism and International Relations: Revisiting Turkish Modernity (Cambridge UP, 2022), Eren Duzgun, argues that this approach to comparative historical analysis not only fails to grasp Ottoman and Turkish history on its own terms, but it also gets European history wrong by overlooking the variety of trajectories of political and economic development that characterized European history from the age of revolutions onwards. Duzgun argues that the concept of Jacobinism holds the key to understanding both Ottoman and Turkish modernization and transitions to modernity in continental Europe that did not correspond to the narrative of ‘bourgeois revolutions’ that undergirds both liberal and Marxist theories of modernization. We will discuss the origins of the Jacobin route to modernity, how the Jacobin model relates to common understandings of capitalist political economies, and why a book about Turkish and Ottoman history needed a chapter on French history.
Eren Duzgun is assistant professor of international relations at the University of Nottingham’s China Campus in Ningbo, China.
Geoffrey Gordon is a PhD candidate in comparative politics at the University of Virginia. Follow him on Twitter: @geofflgordon.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies
Released:
Dec 28, 2022
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Laury Silvers, “A Soaring Minaret: Abu Bakr al-Wasiti and the Rise of Baghdadi Sufism” (SUNY Press, 2010): A broad portrait of early Islamic mysticism is fairly well-know. However, there are only a few key figures that have been explored in great detail and their activities shape how we understand this early history of Sufism. Laury Silvers, by New Books in Islamic Studies