Authorial power, authorianism and the sociology of intellectuals in Turkey

In the paper entitled ‘Moral Authority and the Academy under Attack’, Elizabeth Buckner (Buckner, 2022) suggests that a central basis of Turkish academics’ resistance towards increasing neoliberal authoritarianism at their universities was a sense of ‘moral authority’ that is associated with their profession as autonomous scholars and thinkers in the public realm. Such moral authority is a well-rehearsed concept in the sociology of intellectuals. And while it may sometimes represent political narratives of the state, reconceived as ‘social justice’ or ‘speaking truth to power’, it often gravitates towards, or formulates, critical sites of resistance to political power within HE. In the context of Turkey, both conservative populist intellectuals of the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP) (Gürpınar, 2020) and the critical intellectuals of the Academics for Peace movement (Buckner, 2022) have drawn on and performed such ‘moral authority’ in numerous ways with the goal of addressing diverse publics and audiences. As this article will argue, drawing on interviews with Turkish academics living in exile as a consequence of ascending authoritarianist politics, the idea of moralising discourse as a form of authority has a genealogy that needs examination. If ‘good’ according to Nietzsche is that which ‘heightens the feeling of power, will to power and power itself’, then in what ways and to what extent are intellectuals’ moral authority itself another form of power, even where it resists and uncovers the machinations of power. And more importantly, how do we engage with critical intellectualism as a ‘problem space’ (Scott, 2004, p. 4), that is, as a space of dispute, political contestation and rival views where previous questions, concepts, constructs, ideas, configurations, and so on have irrevocably changed, and where new historical conditions make old questions ‘not so much wrong as irrelevant’. The paper also queries the place of the postcolonial intellectual in this problem space and the figurations it can or might offer to shift registers of resistance in the academy from one of ‘moral authority’ to more humble figurations such as that of the ‘cartographer’ of knowledge, power and resistance (Braidotti, 2021, p. 531).