Social Darwinism in the One-Party Era (1860-1945)

This study focuses on the reflections of the social Darwinism approach, which has a very important place in modern Western thought and was used to reconstruct social life, in the One-Party Period. This approach, which came to the fore with Charles Robert Darwin and explains the emergence of man with natural selection evolution, is based on life with the divine will of matter and force, society with eugenic eugenics, economy with laissez faire free market logic, religion and God with intelligence due to man's ignorance of nature, historical progressive and evolutionist, explains morality as a requirement of the laws of nature. The leading people of the One-Party Period, who had the ideal of rebuilding a society and believed in the Western method of doing it, also used the social Darwinism approach in different ways. In order to understand to what extent social Darwinism had an impact on this process in order to achieve intellectual and social transformation, the textbooks of the period, intellectual and academic journals, newspapers, the First and Second Turkish History Congresses, laws, parliamentary minutes and studies of important figures were examined. These studies are based on the years between 1923 and 1945. When these examinations are made, it will be seen that the social Darwinism approach finds a wide place for itself under the title of "scientificity" and affects many areas, especially the structure of thought.