Barış Büyükokutan

This article features an extensive review of Murray Milner, Jr.’s Elites (2015). After summarizing its argument, locating it in debates in political sociology, and highlighting why it matters, I apply the conceptual framework advanced in the book to Turkey. I find that while Milner’s framework captures the Turkish case quite well, it cannot account for generous state support of some status elites. I offer a tentative solution of this puzzle by distinguishing between political elites’ short- and long-term interests. This shows that Milner’s framework should be developed further to better account for multiple and competing interests.

This article traces Charles Taylor’s “secularity three” outside the west, finding that it was present among poets but not among novelists in twentieth-century Turkey. It explains this contrast between these two very similar groups using network analysis, highlighting the greater availability of nonpious gatekeepers to aspiring pious actors after a long period of religious conflict in poetry networks. In order to benefit from association with these gatekeepers, pious actors learned to split their selves into two, committing themselves simultaneously to their absolutist faith and to its practical impossibility in a secular age. If the prospect of cross-fertilization waned, however, they effortlessly switched back to their earlier subjectivity. Pious novelists underwent no such learning process. Based on these findings, I argue, first, that the study of the secular must pay greater attention to religious conflict and the ways in which it is resolved; second, that it must consider balancing its longue-durée approach with an eventful focus.

Much writing on dissenting intellectuals posits a uniform relationship between autonomy from the popular element and social influence. The case of U.S. poets from 1930 to 1975 challenges this, as dissenting poets' sphere of influence grew during the hegemony of populist as well as antipopulist movements. In order to account for this, this chapter draws on the conceptualization of autonomy as a process whose parameters are mutually irreducible and potentially contradictory. Where these parameters are more or less fully synchronized, dissenting intellectuals face a united bloc of opponents that they cannot divide; therefore, they need to fight all of these opponents simultaneously. Where there is little such synchronization, in contrast, they can negotiate temporary alliances with some of their foes, use these alliances to secure gains in more important fronts, and revise their alliances as circumstances change. Twentieth-century United States, this chapter argues, was an example of the latter kind of setting. Dissenting poets were able to use universities and popular element against one another, depending on how they saw their overall situation. When autonomy from universities mattered most, they reclaimed the popular element; when autonomy from the popular element mattered most, they set aside their differences with university and joined the academic ranks. This distinction between greater and less synchronization of the powers, the chapter argues, has implications for political sociology beyond the study of intellectuals.

Culture and politics have a close relationship, but how exactly does the cultural become the political? This article builds a theoretical framework for this question by examining Vietnam-era U.S. poets’ politicization of Buddhism at the expense of more effective or more easily controllable discursive resources. I find, first, that outcomes depend on whether would-be appropriators and legitimate owners of the appropriated resource can strike a mutually beneficial bargain. Second, whether two such distinct parties emerge depends on how tightly contexts of the appropriation process are linked. Consequently, appropriation is best understood as reciprocal exchange.