Liberal Thought and Hür Fikirler Magazine in Turkey in the transition to multi-party democratic political life

The world into the 20th century; ideological polarization, the division between imperialist blocs, the nation-state understanding has moved away from the universalization/globalization process. The world was divided into two blocs, "Free World/Capitalist Western Bloc and Iron Curtain Countries/Socialist Eastern Bloc" and dragged into the Cold War process. "Free World"; It has risen on the rejection of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes and the acceptance of economic and political liberal values. Turkey determined its direction as the West, both as a necessity and as an opportunity after the war, and started to take steps towards liberalization, trying to take its place in the Free World. In this period, opening up space for "civil society" brought "civil opposition". The first liberal civil opposition of the period, which has many original features in liberal thought in Turkey, was made by the thinkers gathered around the "Society for Spreading Free Ideas/Hür Fikirleri Yayma Cemiyeti (HFYC)" and the "Hür Fikirler" magazine they published. The main hypothesis of this study is that, gathered around the "Hür Fikirler" magazine, which is the publication organ of HFYC, including social and conservative liberals, and under the influence of the process in which the basic premises of liberalism were questioned in the world, a line that mainly embraced the "classical liberal tradition" was followed. For the first time, thinkers with different liberal perceptions around a society and magazine came together around the values of "democracy and freedom" and tried to establish a "common philosophical ground". The hypothesis was measured using "content analysis and historical research method". The first part of the three-part study focuses on the conceptual, theoretical and historical analysis of the emergence and development of liberalism in the West. In the second part, the basic dynamics of liberal theory developed in the West and its theoretical and practical development in the reality of Turkey are examined. In the third part, the political and economic ideas that both HFYC and "Hür Fikirler" magazine advocated during the transition to multi-party life were examined, the ideology they adopted was revealed and at the same time (liberal) values were tried to be adopted and spread in the society. As a result of the study, it was seen that thinkers with different liberal perceptions gathered around the journal came together for the first time around the values of "freedom and democracy" in Turkish liberal thought, and this "leaded" the next periods. In addition, it has been concluded that the magazine undertakes to instill a sense of freedom in every field, with a remarkable timing, as well as the internalization and settlement of the perception towards democracy.