68 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
that the "crisis" in development economics stems from the "cultural barriers" which "Western scholars" have to "struggle" through. Unfortunately, some aspiring Third World scholars of underdevelopment, like Trak, only wish to meet the struggling Western scholars half-way, without making an effort to struggle on their part, at the barriers of incompetence. This masterful incompetence makes it very difficult for them to put forward their own contra viewpoint. It underscores the pathos of the attempt to preserve national and cultural identity in the face of the juggernaut of World capitalism, by clutching on to all those institutions—the leftovers of the feudal past which bind society in the shackles of backwardness—which are now presented as the UDG's original medieval contribution to the development model, for so long monopolised by the post-medieval West.
Ayse Trak discusses three Turkish economists, namely, Sevket Sureyya Aydemir, Ahmet Agaoglu and Ahmet Hamdi Basar. Trak asserts that all three were familiar with Marxist literature—by implication therefore in the same bracket as all those others whose God had failed—an assertion of doubtful certitude which is best ignored. All three, products of the period of the modernisation of Turkey by Kemal Ataturk, were apparently proponents of industrial progress and advocated the establishment of heavy industry. All three were aware of the contradiction between backward Turkey and the West and viewed the necessity of industrialisation in the light of the struggle to maintain the economic and political independence of Turkey. Further, appreciative of the non-existence of a national bourgeoisie and the peculiar circumstance in which this process of industrialisation had to be carried out, all three saw in the state the requisite agent of progress. On the exact mechanics of how private property would co-exist with state-backed industrialisation, there were differences, particularly between Aydemir and Agaoglu. All the three were agreed upon the fact that income should be distributed equitably and the inequitous system of capitalism should be avoided.
Deriving from the role of the state, arises the question of the form of the polity and the rights of individual citizens. While Aydemir had little use for Western-style bourgeois democracy, advocating instead the unquestioned rule by an intellectual elite, Agaoglu apparently desired economic progress within the framework of bourgeois democracy—an "Utopia" as Trak calls it. Basar appears to be closer to Aydemir, albeit in a more diluted fashion.
Finally, what is remarkable about these three political economists is that (apparently) they had nothing to say about the nature of contemporary Turkish society. Trak, while commenting upon this remarkable lacuna, states that they conformed to the statement of Ataturk that "Turkey is a classless, priviligeless, unified society'5. Naturally, they had nothing to say about the state of the traditional sectors of Turkish economy, particularly agriculture. A prescription