The life and times of Niyazi Berkes, 1908-1988

'State and Intellectuals in Turkey: The Life and Times of Niyazi Berkes, 1908-1988' by ?akir Dinç?ahin (Rowman, $80, 186 pages)

This useful new book uses the life of Turkish intellectual Niyazi Berkes as a window to explore the turbulent times through which he lived. The author ?akir Dinç?ahin, an associate professor at Istanbul's Yeditepe University, has written a volume full of details that enrich our understanding of the period, covering a life that spanned the Ottoman and republican eras.

Berkes was born in Cyprus in 1908, the same year that the Young Turk revolution in the Ottoman capital restored constitutional rule and vowed to usher in multi-party politics. The questions of legitimacy, constitutional rule, and modernization would exercise Berkes throughout his life. As Dinç?ahin writes, "an intellectual personality is the outcome of the political and social context surrounding an individual." Berkes certainly lived through interesting times.

He enrolled in the Istanbul School for Boys and then in 1928 the Darülfünün (later Istanbul University) - the two most prestigious schools of the imperial education system. In the early republican years Istanbul University was still dominated by traditional-minded Ottoman-era professors. But as a law and philosophy student Berkes became preoccupied with the question of how Kemalist reforms could penetrate more deeply through the education system and how the modernizing Turkish Republic could develop more equitably. 

His first professional experience after graduating came with the People's Houses, which the regime set up across Turkey to spread republican values by providing education and state-approved cultural services. Between 1932 and 1952, 478 People's Houses and 4,322 People's...