20 Introduction
he departs from simple political definitions (although politics is his main field
of analysis) and speaks of “a modern sensibility” in “artistic, sociocultural,
and literary developments” (including the now famous “individualization”).
Even more importantly, he does not avoid discussing the connections between
“early modernity” and the “dissolution of the feudal structures” and between
“modernity” and the rise of capitalism. He maintains that capitalism should be
connected with modernity, but not necessarily with “early modernity”, or, in
his own words, that “capitalism and colonialism transformed early modernity
to modernity” (in fact, these assessments may be seen as another rendering of
Marx’s “primitive accumulation of capital”).71 This view, in my opinion, is, thus
far, the most satisfactory answer to the question of why “early-modern” politi-
cal and cultural forms were observed in both Europe and the Ottoman Empire.
In short, there is still nothing to successfully take the place of a traditional
paradigm, one now generally viewed as both old-fashioned and (therefore)
unfashionable: namely, the disintegration of medieval feudalism as a result of
the monetarization process.
An alternative approach to the “modernity” paradigm may be based on Max
Weber’s theory of state and authority. Using this, the shift from charismatic
to traditional/patrimonial and finally to legal authority, the three types of
“legitimate rule” according to Weber,72 may be seen in Ottoman developments:
Halil İnalcık has described the “classical” period (i.e. roughly the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries) in terms of a Weberian “patrimonial state”, while one may
see a gradual transition to the “legal” state from the mid-seventeenth century
onwards with the development of an autonomous rational bureaucracy that
became increasingly independent of the ruler’s wishes both in its decisions
a recent reconsideration of Ottoman intellectual life during this period, see El-Rouayheb
2015.
71 Tezcan 2010a, 19ff., 228–232. Ze’evi also stressed that modernity was “forged in tandem
with colonialism” (Ze’evi 2004, 86ff.). Maxime Rodinson’s definitions of the “capitalist
mode of production” (mode de production capitalistique, i.e. production involving salaried
labor and capital investment, even if it is not dominant in the society), “capitalist sector”
(secteur capitalistique, i.e. a sector of the economy where the above means of produc-
tion is dominant, even if this sector is still not dominant in the society) and “capital-
ist socio-economic formation” ( formation socio-économique capitaliste, i.e. an economy
and society fully dominated by capitalist production, with the relevant sociopolitical
implications) are not irrelevant to this discussion, especially in its Islamic context; see
Rodinson 1966.
72 Weber 1985; Spencer 1970; cf. Weber’s views on the rise of rational bureaucracies (Weber
1978, 2:956ff.).