Atatürk: Biography of a Thinker | M. Shukryu Hanioglu

The book reveals the origin of the ideas of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938), which became the basis for the creation of the Turkish Republic and the modern Turkish nation. Some of these ideas were shaped by the events of his childhood and education, as well as by his subsequent military career and political activities. Other ideas arose under the influence of reforms, wars, uprisings and revolutions in the declining six-hundred-year-old Ottoman Empire.

The author pays considerable attention to books and magazines, both European and Turkish, from which Mustafa Kemal adopted popular in the West, albeit dubious and utopian theories of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, such as vulgar materialism, moral Darwinism, positivism, nationalism, racial anthropology and authoritarianism. The study presents a gallery of individuals with whom Atatürk shared his ideas or argued, learned from or used. As a result, Atatürk appears not as a creator of original ideas, but as a politician who managed to implement the utopian projects of marginal Western European intellectuals of his time.

For the thoughtful Ukrainian reader with European ambitions, this book provides a unique opportunity to ponder why Turkey, almost a century after Atatürk's choice of course, still stands on the threshold of Western civilization.