ABSTRACT
The men of Tanzimat wished to create a civil bureaucratic structure corresponding to the legal-rational authority pattern4 of the West. During the War of Independence, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's judgment became even more severe. He later claimed that his 15 March 1920 instructions to all parts of the country concerning the upcoming elections, had been hesitantly followed by the leading bureaucrats at the local level, in contrast to the wholehearted cooperation of the people. All in all, Ataturk's experience with the civil bureaucracy both before and during the War of Independence was very discouraging. Atatürk passed over the civil bureaucracy as an appropriate locus of "stateness," as he was unwilling to revive the "bureaucratic class" of earlier periods. The civil service was expected to display a legalrationality of outcome, rather than the Weberian type. Ataturk's vision of civil bureaucracy was shaped by his perception of the Ottoman bureaucracy as well as by the goals he set for Turkey.
