TURKISH DEVELOPMENT LITERATURE 61 subscribes to views put forward 50 years ago, in an atmosphere of severe political repression. ^ It is even more of a distortion that the reviewer attributes to the paper a total rejection of bourgeois democracy, especially through recurrent references to my qualification of Agaoglu's political views as "Utopian". However, it is clear that in the paper Agaoglu's views arc criticized not because of his firm belief in bourgeois democracy, but because of his neglect of the problems related to the compatibility of democracy with a capitalist development model in a backward country (p 13)» In the light of the recent experience of a large number of underdeveloped countries, this criticism is surely not irrelevant. The reviewer also makes certain mistakes which are due to a not too careful reading of the paper. For example, all the three writers discussed in the paper were not proponents of industrial progress and did not advocate the establishment of heavy industry as maintained by the reviewer. As emphasized in the paper, Ahmct Hamdi Basar believed that "industrial development, that of heavy industry in particular, is not a accessary component of economic progress" (p 16). It is also emphasized that Basar was concerned with the problems of agricultural sector and made policy suggestions to deal with the backward state of agriculture. Ther-efore, the reviewer's statement that "Naturally, (these three writers) had nothing to say about the^ state of the traditional sectors of Turkish economy, particularly agriculture", is very inaccurate. I also want to correct a very understandable mistake, this time not due to any careless reading of the paper: The writer referred to as "he" in the review happens to be a "she". AYSE TRAK A Reply n BEGINNING with an apology to Ms Ayse Trak with regard to the confusion of gender, one would like to briefly touch upon some of the questions raised by her. The approach to the question of development (or under-development) has to take as its point of departure an overview. From what I can gather, at least two of the three Turkish authors had some kind of an overview. Aydemir visualized an industrial/economic offensive launched by the existing ruling classes pivoting on the contradiction with developed countries, while leaving unchanged the forms of class repression exercised by the then Turkish state: hence,, no place for democracy. Agaoglu perceptively seized upon the reactionary and oppressive nature of the Turkish state and posited some form of bourgeois democratic revolution as a first condition to economic and social advance, while, however, failing to grasp the contradiction between the developed and underdeveloped countries. The third, Basar,