Positivism in the Late Ottoman Empire: The “Young Turks” as Mediators and Multipliers

Abstract

By the 1870s positivist tendencies appeared in scientific publications of the Ottoman Young Turks. Soon thereafter Ahmed Rıza, who spent two decades in Paris, embraced Comtean positivism and became the first radical positivist among the Ottomans. Following the constitutional revolution in Istanbul in 1908, Ahmed Rıza became president of the parliament and wielded considerable power to implement positivist principles in education, politics, and morality. Another influential figure, Ziya Gökalp, combined positivism with Durkheimian sociology to construct an ideology for Turkish nationalism. Positivism was soon attacked as unsuited to a traditional and religious society, and had to run the gauntlet of sharp criticism. It initiated a still unfinished debate over the means and scope of modernization in modern Ottoman and Turkish intellectual history. This chapter covers all these issues.