Conceptual analysis of the principle of equality from Tanzimat to the Republic of Turkey

This study deals with the process of transformation of the Ottoman social order into a capitalist social formation through (in)equalities in the social distribution of economic, political (coercive) and ideological (normative) types of social power and changes in these (in)equalities due to capitalisation. (In)equality is basically a concept for measuring the shares obtained from the distribution of social power. For this reason, it enables a comparative analysis of the policies implemented by the core of a world-empire based on the despotic social formation (accepting that the capitalist world-economy will inevitably come under influence to establish the capitalist social formation). The establishment and sustainability of a capitalist society depends on supporting ideological and political equality and rejecting economic equality. In other words, capitalism, which requires the relative equality of the shares to the members of the society from the social distribution of the ideological and political types of power, on the contrary, requires the maintenance of inequality in terms of the social distribution of the economic power. In this respect, it can be said that instead of the term "modern nation-state", a society that has successfully adapted to the advanced capitalist social model by completing its transformation should be named in a way that reveals the formations of social power types in a capitalist society and the relationship of each of these formations with (in)equality. The naming that most clearly reflects the relation of the society in question with (in)equality is "capital-nation-state". In terms of the social transformation of the Ottoman Empire, the Tanzimat era corresponded to an important turning point in the process of transformation into capital-nation-state as it was the period in which a relatively egalitarian schedule ideologically and politically was put into practice by the central government, as an alternative to the established normative patterns embedded in this form. From this perspective, it is possible to deal with the egalitarian reformist moves in the empire in two phases in general, before and after the declaration of the Edict of Gülhane. In terms of focusing on the transformative effect of the principles of ideological and political equality inherent in the form of capitalist society through the Ottoman example, this study concentrates on examining the egalitarian developments in the process from Tanzimat to the Second Constitutional Era corresponding to the last century of the empire and the rising responses to these developments, by making an assessment of the first of these periods in the axis of social power distributions and relations of production in which the Ottoman society passed before capitalism. In this study, which also questioned the traditional acceptance that egalitarian transformations in the Ottoman Empire were generally the result of external pressures and that it was the result of a top-down approach, it was attempted to illuminate in the light of historical data that the claim that there was no social base demanding these transformations did not coincide with reality, although it is undeniable that external pressures play a role as a trigger factor from time to time. Especially in the 18th century, the new ruling class, which was shaped in parallel with the gradual conquest of capitalist economic relations, put pressure on the state to adopt the normative and political equality idealized by liberalism, that is, the liberal economic model built on the equality of opportunity and the citizenship status within the framework of a democratic regime based on the superiority of a secular legal order. However, the pressure encountered in the Ottoman example showed that a society that started to liberalize at a stage where the socioeconomic structure was not strengthened sufficiently due to the lack of mercantilism at the economic level, absolutism at the political level and nationalism at the ideological level could not complete capital-nation-statification by going through a reform process based on the principles of political and ideological equality.