Rediscovery of charisma: A research about Turkish politics after Republic within Weber's concept of charisma

Each community has a leadership and a similar structure. The leader directs his or her viewers, keeps them together and becomes a source of inspiration to them. The leader especially political leader is a concept that creates the Dynamics of Turkish political life and plays a key role of understanding and explaining of Turkish politics. Looking Turkish politics just based on leadership means to oversimplify one way and the complex nature of politics. Many factors such as center-periphery tensions, class conflicts, army,religion relationships also give direction to the politics. The charismatic leader, who is one of the types of leadership, is having the power of combining that differences and diversity and directing them for purpose. The vast majority of the political, social and economic change and transformation in Turkey were conducted by leaders described as charismatic. The subject of this work is examining the Turkish politics after Turkish Republic within the concept of charisma which is one of the authority types of Max Weber. For this reason, first,it has been tried to explain leader and leadership which is the common issue of many disciplines and then it has been attempted to establish a sociological perspective to the charisma. The political life of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Adnan Menderes, Turgut Özal and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan were examined within the concept of Weber's charisma. Key words: charisma, authority, leadership, Turkish politics.