Secularization and the State: The “Mardin Thesis”, Literary Fields, and Social Capital

This article concerns the thesis that state intervention into secularization processes in Turkey vitiates those processes by making them more elitist. By demonstrating that a state action that had nothing to do with secularization pushed the secularization processes of two similar fields of cultural production (poetry and the novel) in opposite directions by changing their composition of human capital in the 1940s, it questions a key assumption of the aforementioned thesis—i.e. that it is possible for the state not to intervene in secularization. It thus calls for a secularization theory in which the state ceases to be the key independent variable—a theory that takes the perspective of civil society and of social capital instead