Doxa of modernization: The sense of political reality in historiographies of the late Ottoman Empire

The notion of modernization has long been a hegemonic explanation for existing global and social hierarchies. Despite the apparent "failure" of "modernizing" countries to overcome a disadvantaged position in the global hierarchy through "modernizing" means, the political life in countries such as Turkey continues to be dominated by perspectives that take "modernization" as a solution for problems for granted. This dissertation examines the sense of political reality that produces an absence of formulations of alternatives to this seemingly "universal" path of historical development and social change through an analytical reading of selected historiographies of the late Ottoman Empire. This analysis relies on Bourdieu's theory of doxa as the sense of limits shared both by "orthodoxy" and "heterodoxy." It first examines the construction of the modernization perspective from an orthodox view in order to identify the limits of the sense of political and historical reality it entails. It then examines three historical studies which are critical of modernizationist orthodoxy under the same criteria. What I call "doxa of modernization" emerges in the shared sense of reality among the orthodox and heterodox accounts. This doxa consists of the generalization of the particular social characteristics and historical conditions seen as constituting a process of "modernization" - namely, the history of power and capital - in such a way that they come to represent all of historical change and of politics. The study concludes by proposing to shift our perspective from a focus on capital to labor in order to bring into view social practices that produce political alternatives in the present.