The Turkish Republic was established in 1923 as an invention of the modernist–
Westernist elites who sought a radical transformation of traditional Ottoman Islamic social,
economic, and political structures after the three-year War of Independence (1919–22)
against foreign occupation in Anatolia. The transformative modernist project of the Westernist
elites took capitalism as the new economic basis of society; the nation-state and parliamentary
democracy as its political structure; and secularization as its cultural process. Yakup Kadri
Karaosmanoğlu first used the term “Kemalism” on 28 June 1929 to refer to
the new nation- and state-building ideology that defined the legitimate political vocabulary
constituting the basic principles and values of the Turkish path to modernity.1 Then
the term “Kemalism” was used in the mainstream histography of the Turkish
Revolution to refer to a new political stand that interpreted the revolutionary practices that had
taken place between 1923 and 1935 within the framework of the tradition of ideological
positivism. It broadly implied a philosophical–political stand that was shaped by an
adherence to the formal “six arrow” principles of the Turkish Revolution. Ali
Kazancigil argued that Kemalist ideology was an amalgam of the ideas associated with laicism,
nationalism, solidarist positivist political theory, and 19th-century scientism.2 The
dominant trend in the histography of the Kemalist revolution saw it as a late-Enlightenment
movement that had its roots in the secular-rationalist tradition of ideological positivism and
characterized the politics of the era as a zero-sum game between secular-modernist Kemalists in
action and religiously oriented anti-modernists in reaction. Yet both the progressive Kemalists and
reactionary groups had heterogeneous structures and were composed of many groups formed
around different philosophical–political understandings about the novelties brought about
by the Turkish Revolution. This study, however, limits itself to the goal of illustrating the plurality
of groups and approaches to the Turkish Revolution within the modernist–Kemalist ranks
of which the neo-republican conservatives were an organic part. How alternative interpretations
of the Turkish Revolution, including the neo-conservative one, became part of the Kemalist
histography is an open-ended question that requires a comprehensive survey of the ideological and
philosophical trends prevalent within the ranks of the modernist elites in the 1920s and 1930s.