Few leaders have been as lionized by their people decades after their deaths or have influenced their nation's political development as much as Turkey's Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. In the wake of World War I and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Atatürk (an honorary title meaning “father of the Turks”) led a war of national independence, established the Turkish Republic, and introduced a series of modernizing/westernizing reforms that included secularization of the state, relative emancipation of women, and westernization of the alphabet, dress, and the legal code.

Esra Özyürek, an anthropologist, examines contemporary Turkish society—including the political and social debate between secular-Republicans and Islamists (including the moderate, currently governing Justice and Development Party)—through the lens of Republican nostalgia for Atatürk's revolution and the modernity it still represents. Drawing upon her interviews of early Republicans, her analyses of museum exhibits, and other evidence, Özyürek discusses how Kemalist myths and symbols have long been used to buttress the norms and ideology of modernization, including, most recently, the introduction of neoliberal reforms that feature free trade and reduce state intervention in the national economy.

While this is a case study, its analysis of the maintenance and manipulation of founding myths and ideologies has applicability well beyond Turkey's borders. Perhaps Özyürek's most interesting contention is that Kemalist symbolism has been altered in recent decades to legitimize the reform and globalization of the nation's economy. Whereas Atatürk's original republicanism featured a powerful state as the agent of Turkish nationalism and economic development (etatism), more recently many of its symbols have been transferred from the public to the private domain in order to support consumerism and antistatist, neoliberal policies. At the same time, in recent years the leading Islamist political party, once adamantly opposed to Kemalist secular reforms, has highlighted some of Atatürk's early speeches defending Islam and the veiling of women, and has published photos of him in prayer or standing next to his then-veiled wife, all in an effort to legitimize their own values in the political arena.

Özyürek's symbolic interpretations generally seem reasonable and insightful. She points out, for example, that in her interviews of “the early Republican generation”—those who came of age in the 1920s and 1930s and were committed to Atatürk's reforms—respondents tended to describe their private lives (e.g., when and where they were married or began working) in the context of the public sphere (for example, where those events fit into the chronology of modernizing reforms). Contemporary Republicans, on the other hand, do not express similar devotion to the public arena.

At times, however, Özyürek's interpretations seem far-fetched, as when she notes that large public statues of Atatürk (which adorn every Turkish city and town) have been supplemented in recent years with miniaturized representations (on items such as T-shirts and coffee mugs) that citizens can purchase and “carry to their private domains.” This, she argues, is emblematic of Turkey's new economic and political development models, representing a “conflation of consumerism and politics” and the “idea of the state … based on the free will and voluntary choice of the private citizen” (p. 124). No doubt Turkey has experienced these broad economic and political transformations. But it is less clear that they are symbolized by Atatürk coffee mugs. Here, as with some of Özyürek's other symbolic interpretation, this reviewer was reminded of Sigmund Freud's alleged comment when asked whether his cigar was a phallic symbol. “Sometimes,” he responded, “a cigar is only a cigar.”

Partha Chatterjee's Politics of the Governed also addresses Third World modernization, particularly how ethnic minorities and other subordinate groups have been only partially incorporated into postcolonial political systems. The book's subtitle refers to the political experiences of “three-fourths of contemporary humanity” now living in nations that “were not direct participants in the history … of modern capitalist democracy” (p. 3). But while this indicates that its analysis is broadly applicable to the developing world, Chatterjee's empirical evidence comes almost exclusively from India, particularly from his home state of West Bengal and its capital, Calcutta. Given India's unique political culture—influenced by Hinduism and the caste system—and West Bengal's atypical politics within India (since 1977 the state has been continuously governed by the Left Front coalition, led by the Communist Party-Marxist), it is questionable how widely we can generalize from his evidence.

In discussing the mobilization of disadvantaged groups (including the urban poor, peasants, and the lower castes), Chatterjee distinguishes between “citizens” and “populations.” Citizens—consisting of the developing world's (or India's) middle and upper classes—are part of civil society, carrying “the moral connotation of sharing in the sovereignty of the state and hence of claiming rights in relation to the state” (p. 136). Drawing on Michel Foucault's notion of “the governmentalization of the state” (p. 34), he argues that members of subaltern (i.e., “popular”) groups are not citizens but are, instead, “populations” whose periodically changing demographics and political role are defined by government policymakers. Since they lack the citizens' moral claims on the state, any benefits that they receive from it (such as housing for urban squatters or food programs for indigent mothers) are based on government calculations of their costs and benefits. Even when organized populations successfully pressure the state, he argues, they do not enter civil society because they must use illegitimate means (often “controlled violence,” such as sit-ins and strikes) to achieve their goals.

Although Chatterjee admits that political demonstrations and patron–client relationships may bring real benefits to less privileged “populations,” he still finds political society (the political world of those who are excluded from civil society) inadequate because it fails to give the underprivileged effective agency. Therefore, the welfare benefits that government policymakers extend at one point may subsequently be withdrawn if the cost–benefit calculations change. The author's distinction between civil and political society is conceptually interesting, but I am not sure how much it adds to our understanding of the politics of the poor. It suggests a fundamental dichotomy in which “bourgeois politics” follows a particular modality and the politics of the underprivileged follows another. Would it not be more illuminating to conceptualize a continuum in which, for example, corporate giants have more influence and “moral rights” (access) to state benefits than do middle-class professionals, while organized urban squatters have greater agency than landless peasants do?

While both books offer much food for thought, many political scientists will find it troubling that a number of their arguments and conclusions are merely the authors' assertions, which lack empirical support. At one point Chatterjee, a historian, insists “that we, as professional social scientists have a responsibility to continue the debates over secularism [and presumably other issues] within the accepted forms of scientific discourse” (p. 115). Yet elsewhere, when discussing an apparently successful protest by Calcutta squatters, he warns that their “story is not a simple story with a happy ending, no story about political society ever is” (p. 67, italics added). Few social scientists who have studied the political mobilization of the Third World's poor would agree that those stories never have a happy ending, unless one's definition of “happy ending” is unreasonably demanding.

Elsewhere (p. 86), after noting that “researchers” differ on the distributive effects of economic globalization, Chatterjee states, “[M]y impression from all that I have heard and seen is that, on balance, inequalities between rich and poor countries have not come down in the last ten or fifteen years; if anything they have probably increased.” Unfortunately, he cites none of the economic research on this subject and decides, instead, to trust his own impressions—drawn from what he has “heard and seen”—over the social science literature on the topic. In point of fact, that body of evidence on economic growth in recent decades indicates that the Third World's most globalized economies (those of India and East Asia) have considerably narrowed their income gaps vis-à-vis the First World, while the least globalized (most notably, in Africa) have fallen behind. It is true that neoliberal reforms and entry into the global economy often increase inequality within developing nations. But in countries such as China and Chile, even though domestic inequalities have widened, a rapidly growing economy has still raised the lower classes' living standards, albeit at a slower pace than middle- and upper-class incomes.

Both of these books are thought provoking and intellectually rich. Chatterjee's work is the more ambitious of the two, but would have benefited from a more nuanced, empirically grounded examination of the politics of subaltern groups.