On the Possibility of a “Soviet of Technicians”

I. Introduction

In The Engineers and the Price System, Veblen (1921) posited a set of persuasive theoretical arguments regarding the existence of a contradictory relationship between the material interests of technicians and businessmen. Nonetheless, he provided various reasons as to why a revolutionary “soviet of technicians” was a remote possibility in America. In substantiating his claim he had recourse to the notion of vested rights of “absentee owners” and how these were resiliently embedded in the “sentiments” of the “underlying population.” In connection with this, he argued that “by settled habit” the technicians, just like other social groups and classes of American society, had been content with the leadership of businessmen. In this paper, I argue that Veblen’s abstract line of reasoning regarding the incongruity between the material interests of engineers and businessmen has a sound theoretical basis. ² What Veblen contemplated as a possibility became a historical reality in the cultural context of Turkey, a country probably furthest removed from his concerns. The engineers of Turkey, by getting organized through a professional union (Union of the Chambers of Turkish Engineers and Architects (UCTEA)), have mobilized against business interests in the name of common people since the 1970s. This has ensued from the unique mixture of past and present social habits of thought in the agency of engineers of Turkey, resulting in – using Veblen’s terminology – an anti-business engineering “point of view” or engineering “spiritual attitude” and a corresponding social and political identity, which has come to be known as “the revolutionary-democrat engineer.”

In what follows, using Veblen’s (2012/1919) cumulative causation methodology, I attempt to provide a theoretical answer for the origin, growth, persistence, and variation of the anti-business engineering outlook in Turkey. My objective is to trace the trail of centuries-old habits of thought in the present ideas and actions of the revolutionary-democrat engineers of the UCTEA. This inquiry may make a modest contribution not only to the Turkish studies beyond the limits of its subject matter but also to the growing importance of Veblen as a radical institutional social theorist. A better understanding of the peculiarity of the engineering point of view and its resultant identity in Turkey may help one to see why Veblen’s claim regarding the potentially contradictory relationship between engineers and businessmen may become an actuality under certain institutional environments, and still why he did not expect the American engineers to rise up against their businessmen.

2. A Revolutionary “Soviet of Technicians”: A Remote Possibility in America

In The Engineers and the Price System, Veblen (1921: 69), when arguing against the possibility of a “soviet of technicians” in America, stated that

[The technicians] still feel themselves, in the nature of things, to fall into place as employees of those enterprising business men who are, in the nature of things, elected to get something for nothing. Absentee ownership is secure, just yet. In time, with sufficient provocation, this popular frame of mind may change, of course; but it is in any case a matter of an appreciable lapse of time.

In other words, he thought that the technicians or the engineers had little or no serious social or political concern about lending themselves and their technical expertise to the “obstructive tactics” of businessmen to which he referred as “sabotage” (Veblen 1921: 8-9). In his mind there was no question that the American engineers in his times were practically commercialized with a heartfelt devotion to the “pecuniary interests” of businessmen.

The question as to how such an idiosyncratic “spiritual attitude” had evolved among the American technicians has long been a topic of interest for those reflecting on Veblen’s institutionalism and his multifarious theoretical heritage (Tilman 1996: 167-197). Many of his commentators provided a variety of reasons for why he was pessimistic about the American engineers’ becoming anti-capitalist actors despite the fact that the country was fast approaching a catastrophe because of the sabotage of businessmen (Tilman 1996: 171). Veblen’s particular conviction, just like his other theoretical anticipations, rested on a series of involved and well-thought-out arguments dispersed throughout his many works. For instance, he discussed in great detail in The Theory of Business Enterprise how the American engineer had gained matter-of-fact habits of thought as a direct result of the machine process within which they were exposed to “an unremitting requirement of quantitative precision, accuracy in point of time and sequence, in the proper inclusion and exclusion of forces affecting” their work (Veblen 1958/1904: 10). Nevertheless, he also argued that “the business discipline” that was unusually forceful throughout the American society compelled them “to conserve, or to rehabilitate, a certain restricted line of institutional habits of thought, viz. those preconceptions of natural rights which have to do with property” (Veblen 1958/1904: 180). Thus, some of Veblen’s commentators have attempted to locate the grounds of his pessimism regarding the American engineers’ submissiveness to business interests in his elaboration of the spiritual attitudes or the points of view of “the Darwinian science” and “the natural rights philosophy” concerning the conceptualization of private property (Wenzler 1998). Between these two distinct spiritual attitudes there was “a difference in the basis of valuation of the facts” (Veblen 2012/1919: 39). For Veblen, Darwinian science corroborated that all the facts required a non-teleological explanation. This was because goal setting and acting upon that goal was a possibility only in the case of human agency, the only agency being with a telos (Veblen 1994/1899: 9). Nature, lacking any agency, could therefore not have any purpose. Quite the opposite, however, the natural rights philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had argued for the existence of an impressive design, and thereby an intention in and of nature regardless of how humans had interpreted it. In the view of natural rights philosophy, nature had a purpose over and above the agency of humans. Moreover, nature had been impacting on humans from a pre-social scheme of morality and compelling human civilization to abide by its principles. In this sense, human agency, if not an epiphenomenon, was only a derivative of the agency of nature.

The disparate epistemological assumptions of these two views on and about human agency and nature reflected explicitly in their treatment of the notion of private property. For Veblen, the Darwinian scientific approach treated ownership “as a social institution rather than a fact of nature,” a conception which was objectionable for the natural rights philosophy (Wenzler 1998:19). According to the latter, ownership was “a ‘natural right,’ in the sense that what a man has made, whatsoever ‘he hath mixed his labor with,’ that has thereby become his own to do with it as he will” (Veblen 1997/1923: 49). Thus, a social category was reduced to and seen as an imperative of nature, and not an institution reproduced by and through cultural practices.

Veblen, following Darwin’s “natural selection” methodology, wanted to develop a theory of social evolution that could address the origin, growth, persistence, and variation of institutions (Tilman 1996: 49-50, 2004: 589). He saw instincts and institutions or social habits of thought as units of selection in the process of cultural evolution (Brette 2003). In this context, he came up with his “cumulative causation” methodology. In Veblen’s (2012/1919: 245) own words:

[In] the Darwinian scheme of thought, the continuity sought in and imputed to the facts is a continuity of cause and effect. It is a scheme of blindly cumulative causation, in which there is no trend, no final term, no consummation. The sequence is controlled by nothing but the vis a tergo ³ of brute causation, and is essentially mechanical.

According to Rutherford (1998: 475-476), Veblen “was aware that individuals acted in a goal-directed manner, but he wanted to present institutional change as unintended result.” Contrary to Rutherford, Hodgson (2004) claimed that Veblen’s explanation of action and institutional change did involve intentionality. For him, “[i]ntentions can be causes, but intentions are always caused. The evolution of intentionality, and its development within each human being, has to be explained in terms of materialist causes and evolutionary selection” (Hodgson 2004: 349). When considered in connection with Hodgson’s, Veblen’s (2012/1919) depiction of the growth of culture as “a cumulative sequence of habituation” appears to be a theory of how past and present are mixed in the process of evolutionary selection. Veblen (1994/1899: 118) puts his theory in plain words in the Theory of the Leisure Class as follows:

Institutions are products of the past process, are adapted to past circumstances, and are therefore never in full accord with the requirements of present . . . . At the same time, men’s present habits of thought tend to persist indefinitely, except as circumstances enforce a change.

What makes Veblen’s views crucial for the questions posed in this paper is the particular manner by which he combines evolutionary selection with technological conditions. As Brette (2003: 463) puts it, Veblen contemplates that “once established, institutions gain a certain autonomy and fall into a relatively coherent system that will, in turn, exert a determining influence on individual and social behavior” (Brette 2003: 463). In other words, each distinctive institutional environment may lead to a particular manner by which technology may be developed, appropriated, or used. In our case, for example (as it will be illustrated in detail below), “the machine process” or modern technology, while it has been effectively reconciled with the requirements of business pursuits within the modernization of Western Christianity, has been appropriated by the UCTEA to serve the material well-being of community within the modernization of Turkey. In point of fact, it is these two contrasting evolutionary paths that I aim to explore here by further questioning what Veblen might have meant by his somewhat uncommon notion of “spiritual attitude.”

As we have seen previously concerning Darwinian science and the natural rights philosophy, spiritual attitude is a result of a specific point of view that induces individuals to make an involved claim to the truth of a thing. If the natural rights view were predominant in society, private property would be affirmed and legitimized without any decisive questioning. In the case of the Darwinian scientific perspective with respect to the predominant spiritual attitude, private property would be seen as a social relation that has come into being by “the vis a tergo of brute causation” (i.e. the sum of the persisting past cultural practices that blindly impact on the present). In a different manner, the legitimacy of private property would come under critical scrutiny with the implication that it might cease to exist as a result of the conscious intervention of actors. Returning to Hodgson’s claim regarding the caused nature of intentionality, one may argue that these two disparate spiritual attitudes cause two distinct kinds of intentionality. Given the existence of private property, the natural rights view causes a kind of intentionality on the part of actors that may induce them to preserve the current social and political arrangements. In contrast, the Darwinian science perspective causes a kind of intentionality that may stimulate actors toward changing the status quo. Thus, the predominant spiritual attitude carries out a selective control over particular institutions. Moreover, it may also “denature” or “degenerate” “them so as to make them coherent with itself” (Brette 2003: 464).

Equipped with a basic understanding of Veblen’s otherwise rich and versatile cumulative causation methodology, we can now turn to why he saw the emergence of a “soviet of technicians” posed against the obstructive tactics of businessmen as an unlikely prospect in America. For Veblen (1994/1899), the institutional evolution of American society resulted in the leisure class, conspicuous consumption, conspicuous waste, invidious comparison, and pecuniary emulation as the fundamental pillars of the predominant spiritual attitude of common man. These institutions had come into being as a result of individuals’ intentional actions geared toward gaining self-respect, social recognition, and hence social status (Powers 2005: 863). They fell into the relatively coherent cultural system to which Veblen referred as “business civilization” (Veblen 1958/1904). In business civilization, in order to be honorable one ought to be not only extremely rich but also exempt from industrial employment. Dowd (2000: 9) explains succinctly why this is particularly valid for Americans:

We seek to convince others – and ourselves – of our worth by a demonstrably wasteful standard of living, and do what we can to become “exempt from industrial pursuits.” To be sure, much of this is true because some wasteful consumption is pleasurable, and most industrial pursuits are poorly paid, monotonous, and even dangerous. But when our pleasure is derived from the attitudes of others (real or presumed) toward our consumption, and when we avoid working with hands even when such activities are not poorly paid, monotonous, or dangerous, it is emulation, or “honorific calculation,” that motivates us.

For Veblen, it was the business point of view which ensued from this particular code of social honor that appeared to engender the predominant spiritual attitude of common man in America. In this context, the position of the American engineers was thoroughly a paradoxical one. On one hand, they came under the discipline of the machine process which “inculcate[d], …, in the habits of life and thought of the workman “mechanical efficiency” understood as “a matter of precisely adjusted cause and effect” with a view to serviceability (Veblen 1958/1904: 147). On the other hand, they kept taking orders from businessmen or “the captains of industry” whose primary concern was not mechanical efficiency or serviceability but “pecuniary gain” through “profitable sale” (Veblen 1958/1904). This noticeable paradoxical position of the American engineers was a consequence of the vis a tergo of institutional evolution of western European societies in line with the natural rights law formulated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This eventually led to the legitimization of economic liberalism in popular opinion via linking individually grounded human rights with basic freedoms.

In his account of the concept of freedom prevalent in Ottoman public opinion, Mardin (1988: 25) provides a concise yet very lucid depiction of the vis a tergo of the scheme of individualistic conception of freedom in “Western Christianity.” In Mardin’s view (1988: 24-25), an individualistically perceived idea of freedom does not only appear to be “an historical emergent” whose roots reside in the pre-medieval Christian publicists’ longing for a “seamless society” but also a result of a series of “historical confrontations between social groups.” He specifies four particular confrontations in this protracted evolutionary process. In chronological order these are between (1) the pre-medieval Church and “autocrats,” (2) the medieval Church and the empire (e.g. the confrontation between Innocent IV and Frederick II), (3) the late medieval feudal nobility and monarchy (e.g. Magna Carta), and (4) the bourgeoisie and absolutist rulers in modern times. Mardin (1988: 25) emphasizes that “a crucial shift occurs with Magna Carta: the collective purpose seen in early Christian ideas disappears and is replaced by matters relating to the ‘control of the purse.’” I should emphasize here that in Turkey the “control of the purse” came into being only in the twentieth century, an evolutionary difference that may explain the distinctiveness of its unique engineering outlook.

In his explanation of the social evolution of Western Christian societies, Veblen offered a compelling historical narration about how “the control of the purse,” emphasized by Mardin, gained the upper hand in times of violent social confrontations, and defined the terms and conditions of social institutions from the perspective of the freedom to own property. He saw the late medieval “handicraft era” as the critical milestone in this unique path of cultural evolution. This era was characterized by the emergence of a “masterless man” who “escaped from the control of their feudal lords . . . by moving into protected cities” (Wenzler 1998: 558). While this new persona was driven to productive activities by his “instinct of workmanship,” he was at the same time interested in earning money for both survival and private accumulation. In this sense, he was both a craftsman and a petty trader. Because of this, for Veblen, “the habitual outlook and bias given by the handicraft system [were] of a twofold character – technological and pecuniary” (cited in Wenzler 1998: 558).

What is critical for our discussion here is that the masterless man as a distinct actor in Western Christianity had unexpectedly legitimized “the control of the purse” or the natural rights law (i.e. the view that private property is a natural right). With the emergence of this novel character more and more people had come to believe that “the property possessed by a handicraft worker was morally equivalent to the amount of industrial labor that he had performed” (Wenzler 1998: 559). A habit of thought that can be summed up as “If you are wealthy you are productive!” gained legitimacy among common people. Surprisingly, the culture of the handicraft era that had equated wealth with labor and thereby adapted to the demands of craftsmanship remained justifiable in the machine industry era. In the machine industry era, businessmen or “absentee owners” as a faction of the leisure class established strict financial control over the industrial system through their ownership, and accumulated wealth via “force and fraud.” This was at the expense of the industrious class involved in an impersonal as well as “interlocking” machine production process (i.e. the modern industrial system). Yet, despite the fact that they did not have anything to do with industrial employment, absentee owners remained to be seen as productive agents because of the enormous wealth that they possessed and controlled. In this sense, the businessman was (and still is) the degenerate form of craftsman. Thus, Veblen thought that the American engineers, because of their being just industrial employees without much prospect for becoming rich – or as Veblen put it, “public Merrymakers” – not only had low self-esteem and social status but also had little chance to gain the backing of the underlying population who were sentimentally in “love” with businessmen. In other words, the dominant frame of mind prevalent in America was not particularly conducive to the formation of a revolutionary “soviet of technicians.”

3. A Revolutionary “Soviet of Technicians” in the Service of Common People: The Case of Turkey ⁴

Returning to Turkey’s engineers, one can argue that a revolutionary “soviet of technicians” in line with Veblen’s depiction in The Engineers and the Price System has always been a possibility in Turkey since the second half of the twentieth century. What is more, the spiritual attitude of the engineers of the Union of the Chambers of Turkish Engineers and Architects, which came into view in the late 1960s, is in sharp conflict with the business point of view. This spiritual attitude aligns with the ideas, principles, and values of engineers largely referred to as “technical workers.” In their own outlook, these engineers see themselves first and foremost as scientific experts and, because of their education and training, claim that they possess power over technology considered “a revolutionary force of production.” Yet they also contend that the effective use of their scientific expertise over technology is obstructed by “imperialists” and “capitalists” or “the dominant forces” (egemen güçler) due to their sectional economic interests. In this context, they argue that governments of Turkey serve primarily imperialist and capitalist interests. Because of imperialism, capitalism, and the ensuing political and economic dependence, “people” (halk) and the country (ülke) are rendered culturally and socially backward and economically poor. This shows to them that technical workers are deliberately hindered from using their capacity to the fullest, and hence are prevented from fulfilling the requirements of their professional responsibilities at all levels of socio-economic planning required for social development. Thus they conclude: under these conditions engineers must be politically active revolutionaries. The revolution in engineering must be a movement towards society captured by the motto “engineering is in the service of society.” The latter is a necessity tightly connected with the movement toward Turkey’s democratization, which is a precondition for the elimination of social inequalities and injustice. Engineers, in order to fulfill their professional calling, must side with the oppressed and exploited laborers, namely the common people.

Obviously, behind the identity of the revolutionary-democrat engineer there is a prolonged process of evolutionary selection. We can begin with the origin of the word engineer, which is in Turkish mühendis. In the late eighteenth century, mühendis had been fabricated from the Arabic word hendese to refer to someone who knows and uses geometry in his occupation (Kunar 1991). The first mühendis schools, Bahr-i Hümayun (1773) and Mühendishane-i Berr-i Hümayun (1795), were founded as military schools to generate a new group of officers who were supposed to know modern science and technologies developed in the West, and apply these in the organizations and activities of the state and the military. The underlying aim was to catch up swiftly with the technologically superior Western states, and thereby reverse the decline of the Ottoman Empire and save the Dar al Islam (the land of Islam). In this sense, the engineer was intentionally created as a “savior” by the state with an unambiguous political mission. The origin of this persona overlapped with the end of traditional order and the beginning of the belated modernization effort called Tanzimat, i.e. the movement and process of the reorganization of the state and its relation to society by adapting modern Western institutions.

Here an important detail should be briefly mentioned. Within the modernization process initiated from above, the state’s creation of a group of technical officers with a secular educational background on the basis of modern science and technology led to a bifurcation not only in the state bureaucracy along the lines of modern/traditional, secular/religious, and Western/local axes but also within the zanaatkar (craftsman) community itself (Mardin 1994). The uniquely political creation of the engineer led to the social dichotomy referred to, by and large, as “mektepli/alaylı” (craftsman with schooling/craftsman without schooling). In due course, the engineer had come to be viewed and approached deferentially as a münevver or aydın (enlightened and enlightener) with the fundamental responsibility and vocation of “saving the motherland.” In this sense, seen as a social institution, the engineer in Turkey does not only appear to be the denatured or degenerated kind of ages-old zanaatkar (craftsman or artisan) in the garb of the mysterious cloak mühendis but also a political actor beyond her/his professional field.

According to Er (1993), when the Turkish Republic was founded in the aftermath of the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, there were only a small number of mühendis left in the country. On April 26, 1926, the Union of Turkish Master Engineers (UTME), the first organization of engineers, was founded by 85 of these engineers as an alumni association without any legal authority over the engineering profession (Er 1993). These engineers were all graduates of the Mühendis Mekteb-i Alisi (later to be İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi), the only engineering school in Turkey at that time.

One of the founding members of the UCTEA, Muzaffer Binici’s portrayal of the conditions that the engineers of the early decades of the Republican regime faced is noteworthy. The following quote provides more than a glimpse of how the engineers, just before the foundation of the UCTEA in 1954, would have posed themselves against the capitalists even if they had not taken on an anti-capitalist stand organizationally yet:

In several public offices that did not want to hear the voice and suggestions of the technique, the inconsiderate management of responsible and authorized individuals caused a spiritual pain in our colleagues. Some of our co-workers who occupied technical positions did not hesitate to apply their personal judgments even if these opposed the principles of their profession. The pressure of the unrestricted competition caused frustration among the contractor colleagues who had devoted their capital and professional life to public service. Only a petition with a 16-kuruş stamp was needed to obtain the Certification of License; and the capitalist contractor who had ruined the money, program and work of an organization could have easily found the opportunity to drag another public office through the same course of events. There was not one single professional community that could have defended the rights of our colleagues from the day they began their careers to their posts in the civil service and eventually to an indifferent private life. (Quoted in Er 1993: 161, emphases are added)

The meaning of Binici’s expressions is not difficult to decipher: long before the foundation of the UCTEA, the engineers of Turkey had seen themselves as a special class of economic actors, who, in their own point of view, existed independently from the capitalist class. They thought that their autonomous social status had derived from their knowledge of “technique” or “state of the industrial arts,” posing them as actors with the moral responsibility for being in the service of the public. The latter would sometimes locate themselves in contradictory situations vis-à-vis the capitalist class whose main concern was pecuniary gain, as in the case of the conflict of interest between the engineer and the capitalist contractor.

Given the gloomy circumstances underlined by Binici, it is not surprising to find out that the official goal of the UTME was to put the various branches of the engineering profession together under the coordination of one single organization in order to defend “the rights of engineers.” Because of the legal ban on the establishment of classed-based organizations during the first three decades of the Republic – which was effective until the mid-1950s – the UTME’s goal did not initially come true. Then, on January 27, 1954, a proposal for the Code of Chambers prepared by the UTME and the UTMA (the Union of Turkish Master Architects) was suddenly promulgated by the National Assembly. Thus, after many bids and rejections, the Union of the Chambers of Turkish Engineers and Architects (UCTEA), one of the politically most influential professional unions of Turkey, gained the status of legal person.

The topic of “foreign” engineers was at the center of the founding members’ “battle” for the rights of Turkish engineers. At this time, the Ministry of Public Works was having difficulty finding the needed technical personnel to work on large public projects. Because of the legally established salary scales, the Ministry could not offer a desirable wage to those engineers who might have wanted to work. When a foreign engineer applied to an advertised position, however, the Ministry could make an individual contract with this engineer and pay a more attractive wage. The following excerpt from the minutes of a meeting on the matter in 1953 may give some idea about why the Turkish engineers conceived the employment of foreign experts as an issue of justice:

If one of the engineers graduated from the same class gets a 60 TL daily wage and the other gets a 25 TL monthly principal salary, the Ministry of Public Works and those concerned must be responsible for explaining this injustice. An injustice has happened, as one friend did not give the salary of his own engineers to the 20 engineers that he brought [from abroad] in order to satisfy the needs of the country. If engineers with the same qualifications got different salaries, this would cause a negative effect. (Quoted in Er 1993: 54-55; emphases are added)

Binici expressed similar views in the same article from which I quoted previously. In this part of his reflection, he compares “modest, valuable and well-educated” Turkish engineers with foreign engineers by framing the latter as employees of “big interests.” It is important to note that Binici refers to the Turkish engineers as “disappointed artisans”:

In our country, which we are reconstructing now again after the great wars that had ruined and neglected her, with the disappointment of being just an onlooker we struggled against foreign elements’ haphazard production of our national and local works. While in hotel corners, modest, valuable and well-educated Turkish artisans were trying to complete the small projects that they had obtained from here or there, foreigners in their fancy offices worked comfortably [on major public projects] that were contracted to big interests. (Quoted in Er 1993: 161-162; emphases are added)

Thus, as one would expect, in the years just after the foundation of the UCTEA – by laying a claim to being professionals with the knowledge of “technique” – the members of the UCTEA refused to be viewed as inferior to foreign experts. Their objective was to get organized within the union and assert their distinct social and economic status in a collective manner. Although the founding leaders succeeded in developing professional awareness among its members, they failed to create a strong sense of corporate collective identity under the UCTEA. They were mostly successful in acquiring cultural, symbolic, and economic resources for their members. Nevertheless, they framed the engineer as an “artisan” with the knowledge of technique and claimed that “the fate of the country was the fate of the mühendis” (Er 1993: 25).

In the second half of the 1960s, a group of young engineers and architects, who had become economically worse-off as result of the rapid increase in the number of engineers with the opening of new engineering schools, began to challenge the founding leaders of the UCTEA for being blind to the hegemony of capitalists over their work and submissive to receiving orders from them. At this time, just as in the rest of the world, socialism was not only popular but also triumphant in Turkey. Thus, by drawing from various kinds of socialist ideas and experiences circulating in the public, members of the UCTEA of the younger generation turned critical with respect to the power of the “dominant forces of society” over the “action fields of technicians” and redefined the requirements of their profession. They considered “the interests of the dominant forces of society” as the principal impediment facing “the attempt to satisfy the needs of all strata within society.” In opposition to the impediment created by the “dominant forces,” they thought they had to turn their face to society at large as there was “a huge demand for technicians” ensuing from the process of industrialization and social development. On the basis of such reasoning, at the beginning of the 1970s, the UCTEA had come forward to announce a new mission for the union: “We, as engineers and architects of Turkey, are in the service of society.”

A note of caution is in order here. In one of the few scholarly works on the UCTEA, Göle (1986) aptly points out that engineering radicalism in Turkey has been profoundly influenced by the positivist paradigms of modernity in line with the illiberal official ideology of the Turkish capitalist state, i.e. Kemalism and its variants. Very much in tune with the frame of mind of the founding fathers of the state, the first generation of radical engineers perceived themselves as a vanguard revolutionary cadre occupying socially and politically vital positions in public organizations. According to this self-perception, engineers were destined to reform the Turkish society from the top in accordance with the so-called requirements of “science.” Needless to say, they failed to show due respect to the autonomy of the common people. In this sense, they were deficient in the democratic credentials that they must have taken on in order to make a rightful claim to being emancipators. With the 12 March 1971 military intervention, however, this situation slowly and gradually began to change. The second generation of radical engineers, as it were, little by little, learned how to free themselves from the undemocratic or rather autocratic posture of the early 1960s and before. Three related processes were operative in this stretched out transformation. First, a large number of engineers lost their economic and social privileges, and thereby their elitist illusions, because of a sharp increase in the number of unemployed engineers entering the labor market every passing year. Second, the junta (first in 1971 and later in 1980) ruthlessly incriminated thousands of socialists and labor activists among whom there were lots of radical engineers from the UCTEA, leading to their alienation from the statist (i.e. positivist) modernist views. Finally, the UCTEA leadership came under fire from its rank and file as being blind to particularistic (i.e. individual/group based or non-collectivist) kinds of inequalities and injustices emanating from gender, ethnic, or religious identities in the midst of an oppressive and violent political environment. The illiberal elitist radicalism of the early UCTEA got further liquefied, just like other solids did, in the liquid modern era of the post-1980s. The question as to whether it completely melted into air or not is beyond the scope of the current paper.

Returning to the term “society” in the mission of the UCTEA constructed in the late 1960s, one can allude to the ordinary people or the “common man” in Veblen’s terminology. Considered on a global scale, this was indeed a very peculiar case. The majority of unions and associations of engineers around the world have come to terms with the political and social leadership of “vested interests” and conceived engineering and engineers as beings that are valued only insofar as they are of use to “business” (Meiksins and Smith 1996; Whalley 1986; Zussman 1985). The position of the UCTEA as an uncommon case rested on the understanding that the practice of engineering and engineers should become independent of the use to which they are put by business and be seen as beings that gain value to the extent that they open themselves up to the unmediated use of common people.

This radical break of the UCTEA with the hegemony of the vested interests gained further momentum after the 12 March 1971 military intervention. During the remainder of the 1970s, the UCTEA fought against the constitutionally illegal actions of governments that were in the service of foreign and national vested interests and defended the democratic rights and freedoms of common people by participating in “the anti-fascist bloc.” This was the fight within which the UCTEA transformed itself into a “revolutionary-democratic” organization, and for almost a decade participated in the political production of a democratic sphere in opposition to the oppression and exploitation of the vested-interests.

The following excerpts amplify how determined the UCTEA was in acting upon the calling of the revolutionary-democrat engineer identity in the 1970s:

We, progressive, democratic, revolutionary technical workers . . . . Declare once again that [repressions] cannot stop the struggle of our people and its indispensable component, technical workers, for independence and democracy. (Birlik Haberleri (Union News), Issue 42, 25 June 1976)

Technical workers have filled their struggle against the repression exercised by ruling classes with a political content by locating their professional problems within the totality of social problems at both national and international levels . . . .The political content of the struggle has taken on a class character and the struggle of all technical workers has become a part of the struggle of all working masses. (Teoman Öztürk, president of the UCTEA, 1976)

After the 12 September 1980 coup d’etat, the UCTEA, as one of the leading organizations siding with the working masses and the coalition of the left, was literally crushed by the military regime. The leaders were arrested, persecuted, and incarcerated. The Code of Chambers was amended to curb the political and economic power of the union. All this happened while Turkish capitalism had been going through one of the deepest and most severe crises triggered by the global crisis of welfare capitalism or embedded liberalism. Just like in other cases, in Turkey too the solution of the vested interests to the economic crisis was neoliberalism. As a pragmatic political project, neoliberalism aimed to dismantle the social state, and thereby free capital from the constraints of redistributive responsibilities, constructed once with the hope of inventing an equitable capitalism. It became all too clear that the fundamental mission of the emergent neoliberal state was to facilitate conditions for profitable business opportunities on the part of both domestic and foreign capital by atomizing individuals and casting them into, to use Marx’s phrase, an “everlasting uncertainty.” Under the conditions of political oppression and neoliberalization, younger generation engineers of the 1980s found themselves alone with the task of building their lives as their “careers.” All this led to the spread of individualism, careerism, and an entrepreneurial spirit both among the administrators and the rank and file of the UCTEA.

In the 1990s the socially detrimental consequences of neoliberalism on the economically disadvantaged classes and groups became all too visible. In response to this, working class activism through labor unions revived and came forward with demands and aspirations in contradiction with the free market ideology of the vested interests. Thus all organizations representing the interest of the common people began to question and realign themselves in the face of growing opposition against neoliberalism. Insofar as the UCTEA was concerned, two major contrasting points of view emerged and enrolled in a power struggle over the mission and the direction of the union in this new era. The first point of view, in tune with the dominant neoliberal business spirit, defended a more limited political role for the union. In this view, the UCTEA should have exclusively acted as a professional organization and defined only the professional powers and responsibilities of engineers and architects. The second point of view endorsed a more comprehensive political role for the union in the social arena. In this view, the UCTEA should have, in addition to functioning as a professional organization, first and foremost participated actively in the formulation of industrial and technology policies, possessed legal powers and responsibilities in the deliberation, policy formulation, implementation, and supervision processes in these areas. Moreover, the union should also have gotten involved in other social and political processes that have had a crucial importance for the well-being of common people. Without doubt, the second view aimed to restore the mission of the union prevalent in the 1970s, that is, “engineers in the service of society (i.e. common people)” represented by those who identified themselves as the “revolutionary-democrat engineers.”

The conflict between the two factions came into the open in the UCTEA Democracy Program and the Democracy Convention held in 1998. In the debates and discussions the revolutionary-democrats overshadowed the entrepreneurial faction and won the hearts and minds of the majority of participants. The convention eventually stated the following definition for the organizational being of the UCTEA in the beginning of the new century – which is as active and spirited as ever today – as we saw in the summer of 2013 during the Gezi Revolt ⁵ :

The UCTEA aims at the preparation and implementation of science and technology policies that cater to the public interest, are oriented towards labor, and are integral and realistic. However, it is aware that under the present conditions it cannot accomplish this on its own. Therefore, it shall join forces with labor-based NGOs, other democratic mass organizations and political parties. It shall support their struggles. . . . (TDPDK 1998: 53-54)

4. The Vis a Tergo of the Revolutionary-Democrat Engineers of Turkey

Any attempt to reconstruct the institutional evolution of revolutionary-democrat engineers’ identity in Turkey has to address the missing link between the concept of freedom and individualism in the history of Turkey until very recently. Turning back to Mardin’s (1988) key article, one can argue that confrontations between social groups in the late-medieval and early modern history of Turkey did not result in any significant “step away from the collectivist definition of freedom.” In this part of the paper, by building on Mardin’s work, I offer a brief sketch of the institutional heritage of the revolutionary-democrat engineer identity. My account rests on the view that “the collectivist conception of freedom” not only differentiates the UCTEA from the majority of engineering associations and unions in the rest of the world but also constitutes the principal element of its spiritual attitude. In the point of view of the engineers of the UCTEA, economic, social, and cultural inequalities always have priority over individual freedoms and, first and foremost, over the right of private ownership. Moreover, if these inequalities persist due to social and political arrangements they can justify the state’s active intervention into civil society in order to restore social justice. As we shall see, the engineers of modern Turkey inherited this spiritual attitude from the craftsmen of the Ottoman Empire organized into guilds.

What Aral (2004) argues in a recent article concerning the perception of the idea of “human rights” in the Ottoman Empire lends unequivocal support to Mardin’s claim regarding the absence of an individualistic idea of freedom in Turkey’s past. As Aral (2004: 454) states, “The Ottoman system prioritized the benefits of collectivities rather than those of individuals, and emphasized justice rather than freedom.” What is more, the idea of freedom, which had always been seen as secondary to social justice, was very much a spiritual notion rather than a rational one (Mardin 1988: 25). Whenever it was uttered in a mundane fashion, it referred to the one who was not a slave (i.e. a reference to the legal status of a person). But if it had been used by reference to its deeper mystical connotations, it would have portrayed an ideal moral person according to the Islamic outlook. In this sense, it was considered an ontological state of the individual regardless of her/his legal status (Aral 2004: 460). In order to be morally right, one must have prevailed over her/his worldly desires and passions and devoted her/his self completely to Allah. This was the true meaning of freedom in the eyes of the common people of Ottoman society. It was also a constant theme in Islamic theology and jurisprudence – both before and after the Ottomans gained the leadership of Muslims – that a state whose members enjoyed uninhibited liberties of action could not realize a moral order, or what Mardin calls a “seamless society.” Thus, while the rights law of early modern Western Christianity rested on a rational view of individual freedom that one could allegedly comprehend through objectively observing and studying natural order, the one associated with the Ottoman Islamic tradition at that time was based on God’s revelation beyond any material or sensual experience. In other words, the latter was a collective representation of moral existence divinely exposed to humanity, which was the basis of a “community-oriented system of law. … No … polarity between state and individual exist[ed] in Islam” (Aral 2004: 461).

For sure, no polarity existed between state and individual in Islamic law understood as a moral doctrine. However, there existed not only polarity but also confrontation between the state and individual as well as among individuals themselves as members of particular social groups in the practical world of Ottomans, which “was decidedly and unambiguously Islamic” (Faroqhi 2010: 242). The Ottoman dynasty gained its legitimacy to reign first and foremost “through the practical services it rendered to the Muslim world. Sultans expanded the domain of Islam by conquering the land of infidel kings, and followed up their successes through the lavish provision of mosques and other charities” (Faroqhi 2010: 247). Second, they posed themselves as the rightful leaders owing to their purportedly divine role in the establishment of “just rule” in the world. “[T]his meant that the sultans claimed to protect their subjects, if necessary, against the administrators they themselves had appointed” (Faroqhi 2010: 247). The latter required a very delicate balancing act that was geared toward reconciling the Islamic law with the everyday rulings of the sultan (kanun). In other words, it necessitated an artful mixing of religious precepts with secular rational imperatives.

Mardin (1988) suggests the use of “the idea of a tacit social contract” developed by Edmund Burke III so as to understand how this peculiar system of legal-rational authority within the boundaries set by Islamic law had been rendered operational in the history of Ottomans. In Mardin’s treatment, Burke’s notion of “tacit social contract” refers to “the moral economy of Ottoman society, a concept that there existed socioeconomic arrangements in Ottoman society which provided a protective shield over Ottoman subjects, and which had to be respected” (Mardin 1988: 29). Understood as such, at the heart of this contract was the dynasty whose symbolic force constituted the principal source of legitimization in all matters of day-to-day rulings. In this sense, it was not the sultan per se but his lineage that had comprised the backbone of the Ottoman moral economy. The supremacy of the dynasty over the personhood of the sultan rested on a long-established point of view, according to which the sultan, due to his possible personal weaknesses, might fail to live up to the obligations of his leadership role. The Ottoman dynasty could never deviate from the principles of the divine revelation. “Basic to this view was the notion taken from a Quranic verse that the entire community was entrusted with ordering the good and prohibiting evil” (Mardin 1988: 29). Beyond that, however, “Pragmatism was … the order of the day” (Faroqhi 2010: 251). This was very much a result of the structure of the religiously diverse Ottoman social formation within which the sultans as the rulers of the populace as a whole were supposed to establish a “just rule” for Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Within the vast Ottoman Empire there were three distinct groups of economic actors: the farmers, the merchants, and the craftsmen. The farmers and the craftsmen, as “the classes who produced the essential necessitates of life,” were subject to the regulations of the hisba (İnalcık 1969: 98). The hisba, constructed in line with what, following Mardin, we may call “the tacit social contract,” was in practice a centrally administered market economy in which “a peasant or a craftsman should freely change the methods of production was not countenanced; his activities were permitted only within the limits of the ordinances laid down by the state” (İnalcık 1969: 98). What is more, the conditions of market supply and demand were under the strict control of the İhtisap Ağası, the head of the office of hisba. The latter was responsible for the requirement that craftsmen were firmly regulated in their buying of raw materials and in the sale of their wares. In other words, “unrestricted” or “free competition” was not allowed in the Ottoman market economy. According to İnalcık, under normal circumstances, no craftsman was allowed to have a profit rate above 10 percent. In this sense, the habitual outlook of craftsmen, if we use a Veblenian term, was not biased toward pecuniary gain. A well-demarcated legal and cultural boundary separated them from the merchants (tüccar) in that the latter were the only economic actors “who enjoyed conditions allowing them to become capitalists.”

In Turkish tüccar is what in English is referred to as the big businessmen who own and control large sums of capital (sermaye or mal). As the moneyed class, the merchants “engaged in international and interregional trade or in the sale of goods imported from afar.” Sure enough, controlling such a bulky “traffic” required not only huge amounts of accumulated wealth but also a vast network of business relations allowing the merchants to develop what Braudel once called the unique capitalist expertise, the capability of managing people from a distance, i.e. “absentee ownership.” Unlike the merchants, the geographic span of the activities of the craftsmen was always local. In other words, they were local actors embedded in local traditions. They sold the goods that they themselves manufactured in the cities where they lived and worked. But that was not the only difference between these two social classes. The most critical difference was that merchants, unlike craftsmen, were “free” from the regulations of the hisba, and thereby “free to accumulate, by any means in [their] power, as much capital as [they] could” (İnalcık 1969: 98). As expected, their habitual outlook was entirely biased toward pecuniary gain. In the Veblenian sense, while the craftsmen made up the urban section of the industrious class, the merchants appeared to be a faction of the leisure class. Yet, similar to the other factions of the leisure class – statesmen, officers, and clergy – their wealth could have been confiscated by the state, if the manner by which they had accumulated their wealth had been perceived or framed as unjust according to the injunctions of “the tacit social contract.”

As the most organized section of the urban industrious class, craftsmen through establishing taifas (guilds) secured for themselves a notable political leverage, so much so that “in many cases the very topography of the Muslim city, which was built essentially on the idea of a market, was determined by the needs of the guildsmen” (Lewis 1937: 20). Although the Byzantine craft organizations of the fifth and sixth centuries appeared to be the predecessors of Ottoman taifas, the latter exhibited certain features that differentiated them from the former and came to be known more as a variant of the category of “Muslim guilds.” Like their Byzantine counterparts, Ottoman guilds were founded by petitioning for the permission of the state. The state in turn granted the license from above in order to regulate the markets and allot to each craft its place (Lewis 1937: 21). In this sense Ottoman guilds were parts of the state organization and hence expected to perform some official duties of public control and supervision in their respective fields of production. Unlike their Byzantine counterparts, Ottoman guilds, just as other forms of Muslim guilds in Islamic history, were also developments from below, formed not only in response to a state function but also to “the social requirements of the labouring masses themselves” (Lewis 1937: 36). When compared with the medieval Western Christian guilds where hostilities between the masters and the journeymen were pervasive because of the limited upward mobility opportunities for the latter, Ottoman guilds were fraternal organizations without much “inner social differentiation” due to their being the heirs of the Islamic guild of the tenth and eleventh centuries. The latter “came into existence in its typical form as an artisan revolt against the rising commercial and financial capitalism of the day” (Lewis 1933: 37). In the thirteenth century, the last precursor of Ottoman guilds emerged in Anatolia (today’s Turkey) that merged with Sufi and Dervish brotherhoods called akhis, which in Turkish means chivalrous and generous:

The Akhis first appear in Anatolia in the years immediately following the Mongol conquest. The period was one of general anarchy and disorder. The Mongols, who had destroyed the Saljuk State, failed to provide any effective alternative, and the administration crumbled away. During this period of crisis, the Akhis appeared as a strong widespread organisation, willing and able to control. With “solidarity and hospitality” as its code, the artisan class as its social basis and “the slaying of tyrants and their satellites” as its task, the Akhi movement spread rapidly in town and countryside. It was a movement at once social, political, religious and military. . . . the Akhis were not merely a professional organisation. They adopted as their duties the maintenance of justice, the prevention and punishment of tyranny …. (Lewis 1937: 28-29)

With the hisba system’s eventual institutionalization, Ottoman taifa gained widespread legitimacy throughout the empire and took on the leadership responsibility of the industrious class as a whole (Faroqhi 2009; Rafeq 1991). The state was always being called upon by the guildsmen to resist “profiteering, fraud, and speculation” committed by the merchant class at the expense of the well-being of laboring masses (İnalcık 1969: 106). Had the state failed to respond to such demands for justice, taifa would have rebelled to voice the moral outrage of the oppressed and the exploited (Yi 2004: 213-235).

5. Concluding Remarks

“In the passage from medieval to modern times,” writes Veblen (1997/1923: 20), “certain profound and enduring changes took effect in the civil and political institutions of Europe.” He then immediately adds:

But all that had gone before was not lost, of course. Many things were carried over. As a matter of course very much of the institutional furniture of the Middle Ages has stood over and has continued to govern men’s conduct and convictions very nicely in one bearing and another through the modern era . . . . Regard being had to the very respectable body of such institutional holdovers, . . . the established order of law and custom is, after all, modern only in the sense that it has been modernised out of the past, and that its modernisation has necessarily been incomplete, in the nature of things.

These lines aptly summarize what has also happened in the case of the modernization of Turkey. In the passage from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic, a number of tremendous and permanent transformations materialized in the social and political institutions of Turkey. “But all that had gone before was not lost, of course. Many things were carried over.” Unlike in the case of the modernization of Europe, however, “the institutional furniture” carried over got mixed with those imported from outside (i.e. “the West”). In this sense, Turkish modernization, while a continuation of the past, was also a divergence from it at the same time.

It is this mixed quality of the institutional baggage dragged into modern Turkey that makes social analysis of her both difficult and exciting all at once. It is difficult in that we are not provided with a handy theory readily available in sociology to deal with the peculiarities of the Turkish case, given that the latter has developed in a constant dialogue with the idiosyncrasies of European modernization. All of the key concepts of “Western” sociology become problematic when they are used in the Turkish context without qualifications. Among these, the concept of the individual appears to be the trickiest of all. If we pose the question as to whether the human individual should be granted certain incontestable “individual freedoms,” we will be left in the dark by the answers of “common men” in the streets of Turkey even today. Their doubt over the notion of individually grounded freedoms appears to derive from the centuries-old habitual spiritual attitude that sees uninhibited individual liberties as potential causes of social injustice. Of all the individually grounded freedoms, the ones associated with the unhindered right of private ownership are approached most cautiously because it is thought that these may lead to a social condition whereby one individual may gain at the expense of others, resulting in an immoral society.

As we have seen, in modern times this particular spiritual attitude is most prevalent among the engineers of the UCTEA, who are indisputably the successors of the medieval craftsmen of the taifa. As the Ottoman craftsmen, they also feel extremely uneasy about unrestricted market competition, which can only be legitimized by reference to the inviolability of private property. In the view of these engineers, free market is the opposite of social economy because it is the shortest way to the deviation from a high standard of morality and the loss of protection from the exploitation of the businessmen (i.e. the manipulation of the market by the tüccar for pecuniary gain). Similar to their bygone akhi “brothers,” these engineers see themselves as agents responsible for “the maintenance of justice, the prevention and punishment of tyranny.” So they mobilize their power over modern technology toward the protection of common people from “profiteering, fraud, and speculation.” Just like the olden akhi guilds, their union, the Union of the Chambers of Turkish Engineers and Architects, is not merely a professional organization. Because of this very fact, the spiritual attitude of the engineers of the UCTEA has implications for the future fabric of Turkish society. Through their social, political, and professional practices they have shown time and again that the democratic responsibility to correct the moral failure of capitalism is not a theoretical work; it is a work of art.