The Turkish Republic was established in 1923 as an invention of the modernist–Westernist elites who sought a radical transformation of traditional Ottoman Islamic social,economic, and political structures after the three-year War of Independence (1919–22)against foreign occupation in Anatolia. The transformative modernist project of the Westernistelites took capitalism as the new economic basis of society; the nation-state and parliamentarydemocracy as its political structure; and secularization as its cultural process. Yakup KadriKaraosmanoğlu first used the term “Kemalism” on 28 June 1929 to refer tothe new nation- and state-building ideology that defined the legitimate political vocabularyconstituting the basic principles and values of the Turkish path to modernity.1 Thenthe term “Kemalism” was used in the mainstream histography of the TurkishRevolution to refer to a new political stand that interpreted the revolutionary practices that hadtaken place between 1923 and 1935 within the framework of the tradition of ideologicalpositivism. It broadly implied a philosophical–political stand that was shaped by anadherence to the formal “six arrow” principles of the Turkish Revolution. AliKazancigil argued that Kemalist ideology was an amalgam of the ideas associated with laicism,nationalism, solidarist positivist political theory, and 19th-century scientism.2 Thedominant trend in the histography of the Kemalist revolution saw it as a late-Enlightenmentmovement that had its roots in the secular-rationalist tradition of ideological positivism andcharacterized the politics of the era as a zero-sum game between secular-modernist Kemalists inaction and religiously oriented anti-modernists in reaction. Yet both the progressive Kemalists andreactionary groups had heterogeneous structures and were composed of many groups formedaround different philosophical–political understandings about the novelties brought aboutby the Turkish Revolution. This study, however, limits itself to the goal of illustrating the pluralityof groups and approaches to the Turkish Revolution within the modernist–Kemalist ranksof which the neo-republican conservatives were an organic part. How alternative interpretationsof the Turkish Revolution, including the neo-conservative one, became part of the Kemalisthistography is an open-ended question that requires a comprehensive survey of the ideological andphilosophical trends prevalent within the ranks of the modernist elites in the 1920s and 1930s.