The development and limits of a secular morality in Positivist Republic: A comparative analysis on Early Republican Turkey and French Third Republic

This study has been designed upon the observation that both the Turkish traditional official historiography and the critical republican history studies, the conceptual toolbox of which was developed by reversing the premises of traditional secularization theories and of the official history, is inadequate for explaining the complex secularization processes. The limit of secularism in French Third Republic and in Early Republican Turkey is analyzed with regards to the development of a secular moral philosophy and its place in moral education in primary and secondary schools. Positivism, which has reconciled reason and progress with the search for order, is considered to be the philosophical foundation of the dominant understanding of morality both in French Third Republic and Early Turkish Republic. However, secular morality, which brought the source and sanction of moral behavior down to earth, consists of a wide spectrum of moral ideas, and displays a diversity which cannot be reduced to positivism. The "secularized school", which has developed out of the need of the capitalist nation state to train the labor force and reinforce national identity and social cohesion, offered an eclectic view of morality and became open to conservative effects in time. In both examples, the socialization of a secular set of values through school is limited in various ways. It is asserted that these limits are determined by economic and political dynamics of the world-system, not by an abstract society, which is monolithic, static and reduced to its religious identity. Keywords: Secular Morality, Moral Education, Laicism, Early Republican Turkey, French Third Republic