The people's houses and the cult of the peasant in Turkey

'Only one peasant stronghold remained in or around the neighbourhood of Europe and the Middle East -Turkey,' wrote historian Eric Hobsbawm, 'where the peasantry declined, but in the mid-1980s, still remained an absolute majority.' One can argue that Hobsbawm made a mistake or exaggerated a little. Statistics, however, confirm the historian's point.2 Indeed, until recently Turkey remained a 'peasant country', and the consequences of this fact, usually unnoticed, have had great impact on the social and intellectual life of the country. The structural reasons behind the predominance of a peasant economy and society in Turkey have been investigated to a great extent, owing largely to the extensive development of the fields of economic history and political economy. However, the subjective factors such as ideas and culture that helped shape and reproduce this phenomenon have not been studied adequately. The role and impact of ideas are essential, for they are the factors which affect the specific ways of historical development, especially when they inspire political movements or become institutionalized as part of a state policy. This paper argues that, as far as the intellectual level is concerned, the lack of a consistent, well-devised, serious and prolonged urban and industrial policy and the predominance of a peasantist outlook among the ruling circles of the single-party regime contributed to the persistence of a predominantly peasant society for much of the twentieth century in Turkey. In other words, the ambiguities and eclecticism of the ruling circles, hesitantly pretending to embrace an urban and industrial outlook on the one hand, and embracing a peasantist one on the other, most probably helped sustain a huge peasant mass. In order to substantiate this argument, we shall analyse the peasantist ideology, whose significance in Turkish intellectual history is underestimated, although it gained widespread currency among the intelligentsia of the 1930s. We shall focus on the People's Houses since this institution was directly founded for the purpose of disseminating the propaganda of the governing People's