Niyazi Berkes Veya Bir Dönemin Gergin Serüveni Üzerine - Niyazi Berkes, Or On The Acrimonious Adventure Of An Epoch

Turkey is a country where peculiar misfortunes are lived in the field of the social sciences as in many other fields. Laughing and crying can be considered as the two different faces of the same manner against the events happening due to the developments that allow the coexistence of tragedy and comedy. The Turkish intellectual, while cogitating about his own society and trying to resolve the problems he faces on the one hand, may become the object of an unexpected resistance, on the other. This situation applies to most of our intellectuals. The intellectual focused on in this article, Niyazi Berkes, can also be considered within this perspective. Based on Niyazi Berkes' work Unutulan Yıllar (The Forgotten Years) which relays his own life story, this study revisits the the period between 1940 and 1950; it discusses the effect of those years on the world of Turkish thought in general, and their shaping role on Berkes' life pattern in particular. The need for the present study stems from the desire to see the delimiting and framing effect on our world of thinking by the positions and reactions of the past actors or intellectuals against the unpleasant events of their epoch; the study also aims atdrawing attention to how national intellectuals oriented themselves to self-banishment in the feelings of displeasement and offendedness when they were exposed to undeserved treatments, and how much we suffered from the drain of national intellectual capital.