Conservative Democracy as the Second Great Divide [?] in Anatolia at the Crossroads of Continuing Changes and Changing Discontinuities

Extrapolating from the entirety of world history, Roberts and Westad (2003) have argued that the pathway and evolutionary dialectic of civilisational transformation are determined by the preferences of a society. This viewpoint would be considered irrational by utilitarians because they hold that there is only one impulse that propels all nations onto a monolithic civilisational pathway, utility. As Roberts and Westad put it, the Chinese or Ottoman Empires, however, in their social organisation, did not prefer to engage with capitalist rationalisations before or after Europe experienced the Renaissance. This was neither a weakness nor a strength, but the spatio-temporal outcome of the original consistencies of these empires. As discussed earlier, for example, the Ottoman Empire’s social organisation was at odds with capitalist progress. The Empire featured pragmatist discretions in commercial life and established patronage linkages between capitalists and bureaucrats and so on. Yet the foundational pillars and evolutionary dynamics of its social system were not predicated upon corporeal ideals and appeals, but a politically contingent rationality (Aydιn, 2009) to eliminate the widening income differentials both between capitalists themselves and among various classes, as can be seen in the relatively positive trend of real wages throughout the Empire’s long durée.