Klasik Sosyolojide Nostaljik Paradigma ve İslamcılıkta Asr-ı Saadet Özlemi

İrfan Kaya

Article Details

Klasik Sosyolojide Nostaljik Paradigma ve İslamcılıkta Asr-ı Saadet Özlemi

Authors:

İrfan Kaya

Main Topics:

Religions (General)

Journal:

Cumhuriyet İlahiyat Dergisi 2017 Vol.21 Issue 1, pp.81-105

Document Type:

Article

Publication Date:

6/2017

Document Language:

Turkish

Document ID (Org No.):

2000918619

Keywords:

Abstract:

 
















This study aims to discuss the basic argument that
sociology, as a science, emerged as an intellectual response to the lost sense
of community during social and cultural changes. This argument carries the
assumption that the dominating metaphors and perspectives of classical
sociology are informed by conservatism. In sociology, this claim is supported
by (both) well-known and ambivalent theoretical structures that are developed
to explain the process of social change. This study aims to make a criticism of
nostalgic sociology considering the idea that the fundamental assumptions of
the ambivalent theoretical structure in sociology are nostalgic. Added to
these, this study also aims to critically read the historical development of
Islamism, one of the modern ideologies, with nostalgia and utopia.   The suggestion of the article is that either
classical sociology or Islamism –two subject appear differently in terms of
their topics- gave similar intellectual reactions about the subject that they
are unable to cope with ‘the present’ and producing a ‘golden age’ discourse as
a solution to ‘the present’. The argument of the study is that either the
effort of idealizing ‘the past’ in classical sociology or the myth of coming back
home in Islamism against cultural alienation and sense of loss which are lived
in ‘the present’ are actually determined by sovereign modernity paradigm.

Behind
the nostalgic paradigm, there is a rebuilt history that is shaped as a
transition from feudalism to capitalism. In this history, the collapse of
feudalism corresponds to the loss of rural community, the loss of personal
expressionism and the loss of unregulated society. In classical sociology, the
heritage left by the solution of this historical reconstruction of society has
become common. The anomaly of the modern world is precisely where the modern
society from traditional society has emerged in the pathological state created
by the loss of social ties with the passing. This pathological condition was
first seen in Swiss mercenaries serving away from home, diagnosing nostalgia as
a diagnosis of discomfort. We know that Johannes Hofer, who has a sense of
humor, has not written any prescription for this disease, which gives some
common signs with his melancholy.  


Sociology,
shaped by three different intellectual movements as intellectual responses to
the French and Industrial revolutions that allow the transformation of the
European society, has taken its place as its focal point, and in the pioneering
names, this change is "a change in everything at a dizzying pace,
everything that has happened has evaporated and the glory of the world has deteriorated.”
Modernity, which refers to the ideals of enlightenment, is blessed not to
progress by nature, fluid, rational, contingent, lacking certainty. In fact,
this blessing has brought with it the enemy of tradition to the 'new' with
reference to its etymological origin. This sophisticated and complex structure
unique to modernity only, has inspired some thinkers to conceive of an
idealized past or future that is now determinative. Both of these ideas are
moderators. The nostalgia becomes modern because of the longing for a home that
no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is coeval with modernity.  


The
article refers to Stauth-Turner's nostalgic paradigm, which provides the
meta-phasic and meta-phase dominance of classical sociology detailed in Nietzsche's
Dance. This paradigm consists of four main components. The first is that the
history that we can summarize as a departure from the golden age when the world
was a nest for man is seen as a collapse and a loss. History is a history of
sorrow and despair, as this collapse will continue to exacerbate in the future.
The example of such a feeling of grief in society theory is Weber's fate
sociology. Because, according to Weber, whatever is waiting for us in the
future is the polar night of the icy darkness, not the sunlight of summer. 


The
second component of the nostalgic paradigm is the sense of secularization,
together with the loss of integrity and moral certainty. This nostalgic
trajectory is a very powerful secularization that emphasizes that such devastating
social processes as urbanization, capitalist industrialization and the
rationalization of everyday life, such as the diversity and complexity of
social structure, the spread of scientific knowledge, urbanization with
increasing population ratio, it brings forward its theory. With the
announcement of the death of God, the gate of a competing and conflicting world
has been opened, from which we have been transformed into a very godlike world.
It is possible to observe a similar point of view in classical sociology in
Durkheim, which has a theoretical basis for the transformation of social
structures through professional distinction in the form of mechanical and
organic solidarity. Durkheim analyzes social change in a deliberate way, and
pre-change stake favors moral coherence. Moral coherence is now lost when
collective consciousness is generally weakened in the post-change phase.  


The
third trajectory we encounter in the nostalgic paradigm is the loss of
individual autonomy and the collapse of genuine social relations. With the loss
of the moral unity, the individual has been caught under the domination of the
bureaucratic state, in macro-social processes and institutions. It is
inevitable that the individual who lost his autonomy is subject to the denial.
The increasing exposure of the individual to social bureaucratic associations
has been conceptualized by the iron cage metaphor in Weberian sociology. The
enlightenment is the result of the panoptic collection of prison. So there is a
nostalgic stance in this compound of the nostalgic paradigm that autonomy-ben
lost because of the fall of the bureaucratic world under the domination of the
modern state.


In
the nostalgic paradigm, the ultimate component is the feeling of laxity,
spontaneity and loss of naturalness. Here, the individual is subject to not
only macro-social processes but also micro-ethics. That is, it is understood
that Adorno's "managed society" or Foucault's notion of closure
prevents the individual's true emotions and enthusiasm, and that the consumer
culture is preoccupied with certain preconceived ways of doing in a world
dominated. To sum up, the metaphor of nostalgia; that we are living in a world
where we have been seized by administrative rules of a central state in a way
that has lost the moral certainty and autonomy of the individual. 



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Article Details

Klasik Sosyolojide Nostaljik Paradigma ve İslamcılıkta Asr-ı Saadet Özlemi

Authors:

İrfan Kaya

Main Topics:

Religions (General)

Journal:

Cumhuriyet İlahiyat Dergisi 2017 Vol.21 Issue 1, pp.81-105

Document Type:

Article

Publication Date:

6/2017

Document Language:

Turkish

Document ID (Org No.):

2000918619

Din Sosyolojisi

Nostalji

Muhafazakârlık

Melankoli

Ütopya

Asr-ı Saadet

Asr-ı Saadet

Issues

Article Details

Authors: İrfan Kaya

Main Topics: Religions (General)

Journal: Cumhuriyet İlahiyat Dergisi 2017 Vol.21 Issue 1, pp.81-105

Document Type: Article

Publication Date: 6/2017

Document Language: Turkish

Document ID (Org No.): 2000918619

Issues

Authors:

İrfan Kaya

Main Topics:

Religions (General)

Journal:

Cumhuriyet İlahiyat Dergisi 2017 Vol.21 Issue 1, pp.81-105

Document Type:

Article

Publication Date:

6/2017

Document Language:

Turkish

Document ID (Org No.):

2000918619