Some Remarks on Certain Keywords in Ziya Gökalp’s Thought

Just like Mehmed Akif, known as the poet of the Hymn to Independence (İstiklal Marşı şairi), Ziya Gökalp also obtained his degree from the School of Veterinary Medicine (Baytar Mektebi), which was one of the prominent schools opened during the post-Tanzimat period; and was thus highly influenced by contemporary strands of thought, and notably positivism. Hence, it is easy to discern the impact of positivism upon the ideas he propounded as a Turkish or Turkish nationalist. The trauma of collapse that the Ottoman Empire suffered in the wake of the Balkan War continued into the First World War years. Although the formation period of his ideas can be traced back to the years before the Second Constitutional Period, it was actually the first two decades of the 20th century when Ziya Gökalp penned his works of intellectual maturity and sophistication. The years in question correspond to the end of the Ottoman Empire and foundation of the Turkish Republic. As an intellectual striving to propose remedies for the Late Ottoman society and the state while faced with the dual mission of standing up against the collapse of the Empire and building a new society, Ziya Gökalp largely drew upon certain keywords expressing his own original ideas, along with the-then popular concepts such as Islamisation, Turkisation and modernization. Some of them pertaining to sociology and some others to ideology and economy, these keywords play a central role in understanding Ziya Gökalp’s thought.