Sabri Ülgener and Ahmed Güner Sayar: A Line in Turkish Economic Thought

Sabri Fehmi Ülgener and Ahmed Güner Sayar are two of the most eminent figures to be recognized through their economic and cultural studies in modern Turkish thought. They have generated remarkable ideas about relative economic underdevelopment in Ottoman-Turkish society, controversial economic policies within capitalism, and the existence of two principal veins in the methodology of economics. This paper aims to ascertain Ülgener and Sayar’s approaches toward the different dimensions of economics and to review the points upon which they agree and disagree in this regard. On the problem of economic underdevelopment, they can be said to generally focus on cultural elements and to have asserted the essence of Sufism to be distorted. They can also be said to have not fallen into any sharp differences over capitalism’s liberal or interventionist policies. On the methodology of economics, they agreed about the need to have an a posteriori character within the scope of the explanatory nature of economic theories. Additionally, they focused on the sociology of economics using the verstehen [German: to understand] method to comprehend human typology in economics through its various aspects. The research findings indicate these two men to have been the architects of an original line in Turkish economic thought by showing consensus on principles and method, despite disagreements on the details.

Performative structures, American exceptionalism, and the legitimation of free trade

In this article, we explore how free trade is performed and maintained as a dominant market institution. Drawing from the notion of performativity in sociology of economics and rhetorical analysis in institutional research, we explore the maintenance of free trade as a state-mediated legitimation process. Our analysis of the US presidents’ speeches over the last 30 years reveal that American presidents recurrently adopted three broad rhetorical strategies to enable free trade. Through ontological strategies, they emphasized how the properties of free trade should be; through cosmological strategies, they conveyed the inevitability of globalization and integration with the global markets, and finally through value-based strategies, they linked free trade to the cultural template of American exceptionalism. Our findings extend the previous marketing literature on market creation by illustrating the rhetorical strategies to perform markets and the role of a powerful political actor in enabling and maintaining a market institution.