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Littera
Hilmi Ozan Özavcı
*“I HAVE DECIDED TO bE WHAT YOu MADE ME”: JEAn-JACquES ROuSSEAu, AHMET AĞAOĞLu AnD THE InTELLECTuAL
ORIgInS OF THE REPubLIC
**SUMMARY
Like most nineteenth-century Francophone sociologists who drew on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s social thought, Ahmet Ağaoğlu (1869-1939) believed that ending political, cultural and economic crises was premised on quelling the problems emanating from the depths of the individual. In his swansong What am I? he brought up the theme of the duplicitous self to argue in more detail how the individual’s self-overcoming could take place in the East.
In this paper, I would like to speak of how Ağaoğlu’s writings served as an agent for the transmission of republican thought from France to Turkey, arguing that one of the defining features of his communitarian defence of liberalism was none other than the Swiss thinker’s influence on his works.
Keywords: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ahmet Ağaoğlu, revolution, liberalism, communitarianism, the individual.
* Assist. Prof. Dr. Hilmi Ozan Özavcı is a lecturer of International relations at Izmir University.
** I would like to thank the British Institute of Ankara for their financial support during my researches that have led to the publication of this article.