Abstract This review essay revisits the debates generated by Eren Düzgün’s Capitalism, Jacobinism and International Relations: Revisiting Turkish Modernity and argues that their significance extends beyond Turkish studies. It shows how Düzgün’s historically specific definition of capitalism—as generalized market dependence rooted in particular social-property relations—opens space for understanding Jacobinism as a distinct, non-capitalist route to modernity. The essay also examines the main criticisms directed at Düzgün, suggesting that many do not fully engage his central conceptual claims. It then turns to Greece and Cyprus not to classify them definitively, but to explore the broader comparative questions opened by Düzgün’s framework. If Turkey appears as the strongest case of sustained Jacobin substitution, Greece and Cyprus are approached more tentatively as cases that complicate and probe the limits of that framework: Greece raises the possibility of a powerful Jacobin ideological legacy without a fully Jacobin state form, while Cyprus points to a more fragmented terrain shaped by colonial modernization, uneven capitalist tendencies, and episodic Jacobin currents. Taken together, these cases suggest that modernity did not unfold along a single capitalist path and that its historical trajectories remained more open, uneven, and contested than conventional narratives allow.
Nicos Trimikliniotis (Wed,) studied this question.