D O C U M E N T/ I N T R O D U C T I O N

intrOduCtiOn tO “artistiC
aWakening in ankara,»
“the artist and pOLitiCs,»
and “the burden Of the
inteLLeCtuaL” bY bÜLent eCevit

sarah-neel smith

The three documents translated here—“Artistic Awakening in Ankara”
(1953), “The Artist and Politics” (1954), and “The Burden of the
Intellectual” (1956)—were written by a young member of Turkey’s
intelligentsia, journalist and future Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit.
Ecevit’s biography is strikingly unusual: it spans the cultural and
political realms, making his writings a particularly rich source for
exploring the intersection of art and politics in mid-century Turkey.
These three polemical newspaper columns epitomize that conjunction.
Composed at the very moment when Turkey defi nitively ended some
twenty-fi ve years of authoritarian single-party rule, they refl ect Ecevit’s
stark opposition to the state’s involvement in a local art world. Just a
few years earlier, dans 1946, a multiparty system had replaced the long-
standing single-party system that had existed since the 1920s, quand
the modernist reformer Mustafa Kemal Atatürk fi rst led the transition
from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic. Par 1950, Turkish
voters had unseated the very leadership that had inducted them into
the principles of secular democracy over the last quarter-century of
radical social and political reform. This event was widely seen as an
indication of the country’s abandonment of its authoritarian past and
the arrival of “true” democracy in Turkey. In the three articles trans-
lated here, and across his broader body of writing, the young intellec-
tual sought to reinterpret the principles of individual participation

108

est ce que je:10.1162/ARTM_a_00134

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in Turkish society during this inaugural experiment with multiparty
democracy.

Ecevit’s contention was that Turkey’s future depended in signifi-
cant ways upon a revolution in the popular appreciation of art and upon
individuals’ contributions to a national cultural sphere free from the
involvement of the state. His columns took up two of the period’s most
pressing questions: the extent to which the state should control the
local art world, and the ways in which Turkey’s newly enfranchised citi-
zens might enact their individual rights within the realm of culture.1
With the historic elections of 1950, a newly formed opposition party
called the Democrat Party (Demokrat Parti) took its place at the nation’s
helm. Local intellectuals, many of whom had grown accustomed to the
single-party state’s demand that Turkish art serve its official secularist
agenda, greeted the new administration with cautious optimism. Sur
the next ten years, the Democrat Party fluctuated dramatically in its
policies toward the arts. Although they began their tenure by granting
unprecedented freedoms of the press and easing the state’s heavy-
handed involvement in the art world, the Democrats soon showed a
predilection for intimidation and censorship: the violent antiminority
pogroms that took place in Istanbul in September 1955 were a shocking
manifestation of state-sanctioned violence in the country’s cultural cap-
ital, and ushered in a new era of repressions.2 In the weeks following,
countless newspapers were temporarily shut down, including Ulus,
where Ecevit was a columnist. The Democrats remained in power for
another half-decade before they were overthrown in a violent military
coup in 1960. Ainsi, as Ecevit’s writings powerfully demonstrate, con-
tentions during this period over the waning “health” of the local art
monde, and discussions about individual and state involvement in the
arts, were inseparable from debates about the changing status of
Turkish democracy.

For a fuller version of many of the arguments made here, see Sarah-Neel Smith, “Art,
Démocratie, and the Culture of Dissent in 1950s Turkey” (PhD diss., Université de
California, 2015), and art historian Zeynep Yasa Yaman’s seminal article “1950’li yılların
sanatsal ortamı ve ‘temsil’ sorunu” [The 1950s Art World and the Problem of “Represen-
tation”], Toplum ve Bilim 79 (Hiver 1998): 94–137.
The events of September 6–7, 1955, were two days of antiminority violence inflicted upon
the sizable Greek, Armenian, and Jewish communities of Istanbul. Although the govern-
ment claimed that the pogroms were a spontaneous reaction to the recent bombing of
Atatürk’s childhood home in Thessaloniki (Grèce), the administration in fact played a
supporting role.

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109

During the waning years of the Ottoman Empire and early years

of the Republic, Turkish artists were eager to develop a modern artistic
tradition that synthesized European aesthetic strategies and what they
saw as distinctly Turkish concerns. In the early 20th century, a group of
artists collectively known as the “1914 Generation”—so-called because
they returned from their studies in Paris at the outbreak of World
War I—used Impressionist strategies to represent iconic (Ottoman)
Turkish landscapes and domestic scenes. In the 1930s and 1940s, art-
ists such as Bedri Rahmi Eyübog˘lu and the other members of the
loosely affiliated “D Group” (D Grubu) brought Cubist idioms to bear
upon the new category of “national art” (milli sanat). By the 1950s,
Turkish modernism was colored by international Cold War discourses
that portrayed the world as locked in a struggle between free demo-
cratic nations and totalitarian regimes. Turkey began receiving
Marshall Plan monies in 1947: during what came to be known as its
“American decade,” the country underwent large-scale political and
economic changes designed to align it with Western liberal democra-
cies.3 The local intelligentsia was also sensitive to the fact that the
major international powers saw Turkey as a battleground between
Western democracies and the Stalinist regime in neighboring Soviet
Russia. Against this backdrop, a flourishing national cultural life was
seen as both a crucial way to measure what was commonly dubbed the
“level of democracy” (demokrasi seviyesi) in Turkey, and a means to
ensure democracy’s fragile hold in this strategically located young
nation.

Like many of his peers, Ecevit sought to integrate the ideals of

Western liberal democracy into the Turkish cultural sphere, placing
particular emphasis on the idea that only as individual citizens made
use of their democratic right to contestation and dissent would democ-
racy firmly root itself and thrive. The three articles reprinted here are
composed in Ecevit’s signature style, in which short, polemic sentences
build to a forceful final paragraph. Néanmoins, they represent the
writer in three distinct journalistic modes. “The Artist and Politics”
(1954) takes a broad view of the structure and functions of democracy
in Turkey, mapping out existing relationships between the state and its
citizens in a country that Ecevit describes as having “only recently

Çag˘lar Keyder, “The Political Economy of Turkish Democracy,” New Left Review, Non. 115
(May–June 1979): 11–16, 40.

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passed through democracy’s gates.” “Artistic Awakening in Ankara”
(1953) is a more straightforwardly journalistic piece, documenting a
series of contemporaneous art world events that seem to anticipate and
complement the theoretical armature of “The Artist and Politics.”
Enfin, “The Burden of the Intellectual” (1956) is a modern parable in
which Ecevit describes an imagined encounter between two citizens in
order to drive home a lesson regarding the necessity for an intellectual
class to espouse an empathetic, nonelitist model of citizenship in order
for Turkish democracy to function properly.

bÜLent eCevit: CritiC, gaLLerist, pOLitiCian

Bülent Ecevit grew up in a middle-class family rich in cultural capital.
His father taught history at Ankara University and dabbled in politics;
his mother graduated from the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts
(now Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University). As a student at Istanbul’s
premier English-language high school, Robert College, Ecevit began
composing his own poetry in the early 1940s. He also published trans-
lations of an impressive roster of
authors including T.S. Eliot,
Rudyard Kipling, Philip Larkin,
David Mallet, Ezra Pound, et
Rabindranath Tagore. It was
Ecevit’s infatuation with Tagore
that inspired the young poet to
audit classes at the School of
Oriental and African Studies in
Londres, where he had taken a job
as a press attaché at the Turkish
Embassy in the late 1940s.

Like many Turks then living

à l'étranger, Ecevit and his wife
Rahs¸an returned to Turkey when
the Democrats came to power.
Newly settled in Ankara, Ecevit
began building what he described
as a “tripod” of activities that
structured his life over the next
fi fteen years, while laying the
ground for the political career

Bülent Ecevit, 1956. Bülent & Rahs¸an Ecevit personal archive, Ankara.

Photograph by Ulus staff photographer.

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111

that he pursued until his death.4 First, he began publishing a daily col-
umn in Ulus, the main outlet for opponents of the Democrat adminis-
tration. While the bulk of his writings consisted of political critique, dans
his early years at Ulus Ecevit—who once wrote that “since childhood,
my main field of interest has been literature and arts”—also took up an
additional topic: visual art.5 Between 1950 et 1956, he produced more
que 100 exhibition reviews and critiques of the Turkish art world. Le
young journalist also used his column to promote his own art gallery—
in fact, only the second art gallery established in Turkey—called the
Helikon Association Gallery (Helikon Derneg˘ i Galerisi), which he
cofounded with a group of like-minded friends in 1952.6 Helikon was
named after the mountaintop where the muses of Greek myth made
their home, designating the gallery as a site of creative inspiration for
multiple art forms. Like its Istanbul-based precursor, Galeri Maya
(established in 1950), Helikon was a privately run space whose found-
ers conceived of its mission primarily as a public service (kamu hizmeti)
rather than as a means to achieve commercial profit. (The logic here was
that exposing unschooled audiences to avant-garde art forms would
advance the cultural sophistication of the nation at large.) Enfin, dans
1954 Ecevit cofounded Forum, a trailblazing political journal that
sought to embody the spirit of multiparty democracy by accommodat-
ing differing political views rather than adhering to the partisan model
then dominating the Turkish press.7 While Forum was only active until
1960, its unexpected success, like that of Helikon, was widely seen as
an indication of the pressing need for new approaches to civic debate.

In short, following the political changes of 1950, Ecevit positioned
both his written criticism and his newly founded art space as enclaves
for the continuation of the progressive social and political moderniza-
tion project of the early Turkish Republic, and as sites for its critique,
reinterpretation, and reinvigoration. Following his official entrance into
Turkish politics as a member of parliament in 1957, Ecevit’s rise

Bülent Ecevit, unpublished personal statement, Personal File and Application (1956), RG
10.2, Series 805E, The Rockefeller Foundation, Sleepy Hollow, New York.
Ibid..

5
6 While the collaborative nature of Helikon’s activities makes it difficult to assign specific

roles, key supporters included Selma Arel and Bülent Arel (later a founding figure in
electronic music who worked at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center), Zerrin
and Rasin Arsebük, and Bülent and Rahs¸an Ecevit.
Diren Çakmak, Forum Dergisi: 1954–1960 [Forum Magazine: 1954–1960] (Istanbul: Libra
Kitapçılık ve Yayıncılık, 2010).

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through the ranks of the Republican Peoples’ Party (or RPP, Atatürk’s
original party) was rapid: after a period as Minister of Labor in the
1960s, Ecevit became leader of the RPP in 1972 and served as prime
minister three times during the following decade. Much of Ecevit’s suc-
cess in the 1960s and 70s was based on his efforts to rebrand the RPP
as “left of center” (ortanın solu) and to propel the party away from its
domineering paternalistic approach of tending over the masses and
toward a program intended to enable more popular participation—a
populist politics with which he had begun to experiment through his
“tripod” of activities at Ulus, Helikon, and Forum.8

LiberaL individuaLism and the turkish CuLturaL sphere

“The Artist and Politics” argues that members of Turkish society, et
artists above all others, must demand the government’s recognition of
their individuality as freethinking citizens rather than unthinkingly
adhering to a nationalist ideology handed down by a ministering elite.
This is, essentially, an argument for more extensive popular participa-
tion in Turkey’s public life—the very phenomenon that had been so
celebrated during the 1950 election that brought the Democrats to
pouvoir, when Turkey’s voters participated at a staggering rate of ninety
percent.9 Ecevit suggested that democracy would only be able to thrive
in Turkey if its “local citizens” continued the trajectory begun with
the granting of a vote under the multiparty system, by demanding
acknowledgment of “people’s individuality and personhood” [insanların
bireylig˘ i (ferdiyeti) ve kiss¸ilig˘ i]. Surtout, Ecevit assigned the work of
demanding due recognition of the individual to artists: as he argued
in “The Artist and Politics,” it was “writers, and in the broadest sense
artists” who conducted the deepest investigations of individual con-
sciousness. Such was the importance of the artist’s role in Ecevit’s
theory that he went so far as to claim that “there can be no democracy
in countries where the artist is not actively involved in politics.” What

8 While it is generally argued that the 1960s marks the moment of the left’s emergence as
a political force in Turkey, I have contended elsewhere that the 1950s in fact represented
a vital period when a democratic left began to stir. En outre, I suggest that such
stirrings are detectable not merely in the form of parties, solidarity groups, or public
declarations of political allegiance, but rather in the realm of culture, where the Turkish
intelligentsia’s left-leaning inclinations manifested themselves in more subtle ways. Voir
Forgeron, “Art, Démocratie, and the Culture of Dissent,” and Kemal H. Karpat, “The Turkish
Gauche,” Journal of Contemporary History 1, Non. 2 (Janvier 1, 1966): 169–86.
Keyder, “Political Economy of Turkish Democracy,» 18.

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113

is more, he contended, it was precisely the ability to understand
“Humanity in the abstract sense” that distinguished free democracies
from totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.
Ecevit’s argument for the artist’s vanguard role in society inter-

sected directly with the emergent discussions around political liberal-
ism in which he was involved at Forum. Citing British and American
liberal democracies as their ideal, the Forum thinkers associated several
principles with liberalism, including tolerance, freedom of thought,
and the importance of a free press. (The journal’s title was intended to
simultaneously invoke the origins of democracy in the ancient world
and the open sphere of debate that the journal’s founders saw as being
provided by the Western press.) Above all else, Ecevit and his Forum col-
laborators saw Britain and the United States as exemplifying the key
principle that “ideas [must be] openly shared and debated” ( fikirlerin ser-
bestçe söylenmesi ve tartıss¸ılması) in order to “establish a stable armature
for freedom in our country” (memleketimizde kararlıklı bir hürriyet düzeni
kurulabilmesi için).10 At a juncture when American liberalism was closely
associated with the capitalist but still left-wing policies of the American
Democratic Party, individuals such as Ecevit approvingly identified
with such “liberal” principles in order to indicate that they were pro-
democracy and pro-freedom. Ainsi, in asserting in “The Artist and
Politics” that “there can be no democracy in countries where the artist is
not actively involved in politics,” the poet-politician sought to articulate
an integral role for the arts within an ideal civic order that he and his
peers theorized through a concept of “liberalism”—a concept that they
were in the very process of defining in Turkey for the first time.11

ChaLLenging OffiCiaLdOm:

independent arts initiatives Of the 1950s

In contrast to the theoretical formulations of “The Artist and Politics,»
“Artistic Awakening in Ankara” documents several concrete ways that a

10 Bülent Ecevit, “Forumun davası” [The Purpose of Forum], Forum, Non. 1 (Avril 1, 1954), 1;

reprinted in Çakmak, Forum Dergisi, 153.
Because Turkey decisively transitioned to a free market economy in the 1980s, the terms
“liberal” and “liberalization” have developed a close association with the post-1980s
period. Cependant, one of the most significant factors shaping the 1950s was the Democrat
Party’s unprecedented pursuit of economic liberalization as an integral part of Turkey’s
post-WWII rapprochement with the United States. Ainsi, the concepts were already in cir-
culation during this early phase, and even those who articulated their own positions in
explicit opposition to the Democrats, such as Ecevit, made appeals to what they identified
as “liberal” principles.

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local intelligentsia responded to the question of how Turkish citizens
might enact their individual liberties within the realm of culture. Le
column describes a local art world divided in two. In Ecevit’s portrayal,
agents of the state, d'un côté, advocate conservative aesthetic
modes, exhibition formats, and patterns of consumption; on the
other, upstart young art lovers engage in unprecedented forms of self-
organization and consumption that reflect a commitment to the liberal
principles of “individuality and personhood.” The object of Ecevit’s cri-
tique was what he called “officialdom” at large, with its conservative
preference for klasik painting (an innocuous realism, primarily land-
scapes and still lifes, promoted by the yearly State Painting and
Sculpture Exhibitions). Against officialdom Ecevit pitted an emergent
“intellectual youth” who, he noted happily, supported “today’s advanced
art movements,” such as abstract painting and twelve-tone music.
En effet, Ecevit’s broader critical lexicon was structured around these
opposing categories. On the one side stood a host of terms associated
with officialdom (resmî) in its broadest sense: entities such as official
authorities (resmi makamlar), statesmen (devlet adamları), and wardens
of the state (devlet korucuyuları). On the other side of this conceptual
field stood notions of individuality and individual consciousness: indi-
viduality (bireylik and ss¸ahsiyet), personhood (ferdiyet and kiss¸ilik), a psy-
chological world or universe (psikolojik alemi), and the interior depths
of the soul (ruh derinlig˘i). In “The Artist and Politics,” for example, le
thickly layered phrase insanların bireylig˘i (ferdiyeti) ve kiss¸ilig˘i—which
translates literally to “people’s individuality (individuality) and person-
hood”—includes no fewer than four terms invoking the singular being
of the individual citizen.

“Artistic Awakening in Ankara” provides a valuable historical
record of an energetic but short-lived surge in independent initiatives
that took place immediately after the Democrat Party’s arrival to
power in Turkey. Ecevit cataloged not only the activities of his own
galeri, but also an exhibition program at Ankara University and an
organization called the Ankara Law Employees Intellectual Society
(Ankara Hukuk Mensupları Fikir Kulübü).12 This shared impulse toward

12 Other initiatives of the 1950s included the Art Lovers’ Society (Sanat Severler Cemiyeti),

the Friends of Art Association (Sanat Dostlar Derneg˘i), and the University Student Music
Association (Üniversiteliler Müzik Derneg˘i). Some of the most important exhibition ven-
ues were those funded by foreign governments at the French Consulate, the United
States Information Service (Amerikan Haberler Merkezi), and the German Cultural
Centre (Alman Kültür Merkezi, later the Goethe Institut).

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115

soi- organization emerged in response to what one reporter called “the
placelessness problem” (yersizlik meselesi), the long-standing absence of
public venues for visual art.13 Two important arenas for popular educa-
tion about art under the RPP were the Peoples’ Houses (Halk Evleri), un
nationwide network of nearly 4,000 urban community centers founded
dans 1932, and the Village Institutes (Köy Enstitüleri), a similar initiative
begun in 1940 and located in Turkey’s rural areas, the primary goal of
which was to increase literacy rates and create a self-sustaining educa-
tional system.14 However, the Peoples’ Houses were shut down by the
Democrats a year into their administration, and the Village Institutes
were eliminated in 1954. Ainsi, Helikon was part of a broader move-
ment to supplement an acutely felt lack while challenging the state’s
historic dominance of the national cultural sphere.

The very artistic forms that Helikon supported—primarily soyut
sanat or “abstract art”— marked it as an enclave for artists who chal-
lenged these long-standing ideological imperatives. Soyut sanat was a
loose set of practices based in the shared formal impulse to break away,
to varying extents, from painting’s allegiance to a recognizable referent.
It gained prevalence in Turkey in the late 1940s and quickly became the
center of the defining artistic debate of the 1950s.15 Such practices were
considered by many as a form of creative expression that successfully
evaded traditional state control because of its absence of identifiable
“content.” It also posed a direct challenge to the enduring paradigm of
klasik painting. Enfin, at a moment when international discourse
increasingly linked formal abstraction with advanced forms of democ-
racy, critics like Ecevit were instrumental in spreading the idea that
abstraction’s emphasis on individual consciousness promoted demo-
cratic civic participation.16

Ecevit credited these unprecedented arts organizations with gener-

ating an intellectual community that actively realized the ideal social

13 Bir I˙stanbullu [An Istanbulite], “Maya,” Yeni I˙stanbul, Décembre 26, 1950.
14 The Institutes came under attack throughout the 1940s and 1950s from opponents of the
RPP (who saw them as outlets for the promotion of the party’s ideology) and members of
the right (who argued that they were hotbeds of Communism). See Ekrem Is¸ın, Düss¸ünen
tohum konuss¸an toprak: Cumhuriyet’in köy enstitüleri 1940–1954 [Mindful Seed, Speaking
Soil: Village Institutes of the Republic 1940–1954] (Istanbul: I˙stanbul Aras¸tırmaları
Enstitüsü, 2012).
Yaman, “1950s Art World.”

15
16 Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World

War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

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order that he theorized in “The Artist and Politics.” As he put it,
“perhaps the best aspect of the new artistic awakening in Ankara is
that it is an awakening unconnected to state support. No longer over-
shadowed, the intellectual community in Ankara has blossomed
to the extent that it no longer needs other sources of benefaction.”
Surtout, with the question of “benefaction,” Ecevit also incorpo-
rates an additional dimension—the economic—into his larger argu-
ment that the nation’s future as a democracy is reliant upon a shift to a
participatory model of society. In “Artistic Awakening,” he reframes the
dichotomy of the individual versus the state as a question of patronage,
announcing confidently that “it used to be that the state was the most
reliable patron of art exhibitions,” but that “now, individuals’ gradually
increasing interest fills in the void left by state support.” Crucial here is
Ecevit’s argument that one of the ways Turkey’s citizens are asserting
their “individuality and personhood” in the art world is by buying
things. Ce, he argues, is the healthiest way for the cultural sphere to
function because it evades the pressures of a state ideological program,
and “modern art receives support in the most salubrious way.”

In “Artistic Awakening in Ankara,” the capitalist market appears
as a free democratic zone of consumption where the previously disen-
franchised Turkish masses can use their purchasing power to shape
the future of the nation—voting with their wallets, so to speak. C'est
important to note the utopianism of these early Cold War claims for
capitalism’s role in securing Turkish democracy, and that such claims
are above all else a consequence of his effort to articulate political alter-
natives to totalitarianism. Ecevit was writing in the context of dramati-
cally changed economic conditions engineered by the Democrats in
1950, when they stimulated a seemingly miraculous (although short-
lived) turnaround in the failing, state-controlled national economy by
opening it up to private and foreign investment.17 This was also a cen-
tral way that Turkey gained entry to an international community of cap-
italist democracies as it entered its own “American decade.” In “Artistic
Awakening,” Ecevit, who routinely described his gallery as “the site of
painting’s best sales” or “record-breaking sales,” positioned Helikon as
a successful microcosm of this newly open and privatized national
economy, where Turkish citizens could enact social change by exerting
their individual purchasing power. Ainsi, art sales were an auspicious

17 Keyder, “Political Economy of Turkish Democracy,» 19.

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sign of an “awakening unconnected to state support,” and an upswing
in consumption could stand as a symbol of popular empowerment.
Even as he positioned Helikon as a space of independent activity that
resisted the involvement of the state, Ecevit suggested that societal
change would come about through the distribution of artworks enabled
by the new liberal economic policies that the Democrat Party had
enacted.

bearing the “burden Of the inteLLeCtuaL”

While arts initiatives of the 1950s rarely came under direct attack, ils
certainly occupied a vulnerable position within the broader cultural
sphère. During the tumultuous antiminority events of September
1955,18 Par exemple, the fact that Helikon’s name referenced Greek
mythology was seen as justification enough for the government to tem-
porarily shut it down. Although the space briefly recommenced its
activités, its founders dispersed by 1956. It was apparent by this point
that many of the democratic promises of the early 1950s had already
begun to dissolve, and perhaps now were out of reach entirely. Ecevit
soon abandoned the arts-related pursuits that he had once described as
his “main field of interest” and commenced his political career. If this
choice seems to signal a certain disillusionment, Ecevit was far from
alone: intellectuals across the country publicly debated how “to more
effectively oppose the steps the government has already taken to do
away with Turkish intellectual life.”19

Such were the conditions in which Ecevit penned “The Burden of
the Intellectual” (1956), in which the young writer used the imagined
scenario of a conversation between strangers to evaluate the ways in
which Turkey’s intelligentsia (aydınlar) had contributed to the country’s
recent experiment with multiparty democracy. His conclusions were
damning. The column takes the form of an imaginary encounter on a
public bus between a hostile member of the elite and an impoverished,
uneducated member of the halk (people, or masses). Ecevit begins by
introducing a typical member of the Turkish intelligentsia who sneers
at a shabby fellow bus-rider, identifying him as the source of the failure
of Turkish democracy: “‘There you have it,’ he’ll say, ‘that man sitting
across from us is our destiny. If democracy is brought to a country

18
19

See note 2 au-dessus de.
“I˙s¸te Forum budur” [This is Forum], Forum, Février 15, 1956.

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where eighty percent of the population are illiterate, that’s exactly what
our country will look like!’” The scene provides a starting point from
which Ecevit launches his own attack on the haughty bus-rider. Il
quickly advances a short series of arguments regarding the proper role
of the “intellectual minority” (aydınlık azınlıg˘ı) in democratic societies,
in order to lay the ground for the column’s final, decisive lines where he
subjects the contemptuous intellectual to his very own critique: “If
democracy is brought to a country where eighty percent of the intelli-
gentsia are either haughty and spineless, lazy and dyspeptic, or fearful
and lacking in belief, this is what our country will become!” By the
scene’s close, the reader is meant to understand that it is in fact they,
the members of the intelligentsia unable to tolerate the democratic par-
ticipation of all members of Turkish society, who should be held
responsible for misdirecting the country’s future.

Ecevit advanced an energetic argument for social responsibility at

a moment when, it seemed, the administration and the intelligentsia
alike were ready to abandon such principles. The new atmosphere of
popular empowerment of the 1950s was not an entirely comfortable
reality for the urban elite who had spent the past few decades minister-
ing the rural masses. The fact that the more than four million citizens
who voted for the Democrats in 1950—a majority of them from the
country’s rural regions—chose to unseat the very leaders who had first
introduced them to the elementary principles of democracy under the
single-party system was seen as a potent symbol of the will of the halk
fully at work. Suddenly the halk took on a new dimension: no longer
merely ignorant masses needing to be schooled in the ways of modern
vie, they now appeared as active political citizens who knew full well
how to use their votes. Local intellectuals were thus powerfully aware
that republican top-down approaches to the halk threatened the princi-
ples of democracy itself. They believed deeply that Turkey’s future lay
in its ability to function as a democratic, egalitarian country, and craved
the legitimacy this offered internationally. Yet the intelligentsia also
feared that if it did not properly direct the cultural education of an
unenlightened majority, the halk’s actions might stand in the way of
Turkey’s quest for international respect.

The imperative to abandon such fears, to leave behind “the pride-

fulness and feelings of superiority” and to instead adopt a stance of
“humility” (alçakgönüllük)—this was the burden of the intellectual.
Such humility, explained Ecevit, would mean that rather than con-

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demning the poor and uneducated, Turkey’s intellectuals would
instead adopt an empathetic stance, would not only “heed the concerns
of the majority” but would also “interest themselves in their concerns.”
The article’s final lines serve as a rallying cry, as Ecevit exhorts his fel-
low thinkers not to take the path of those who are “lazy and dyspeptic,
fearful and lacking in belief,” but instead to actively intervene in the
changing social and political order of their country. It is here that the
stakes of Ecevit’s broader efforts across his writings, his work as a gal-
lerist, and his political career become clear—nothing less than the suc-
cess or failure of Turkish democracy itself.