Legislating Authority

"Legislation Authority "addresses issues of law, state violence, and state authority within the Ottoman and Turkish context. Rather than engaging in the usual scholarly debate surrounding Ottoman legal reform--contesting or supporting its "secular" or "modern" nature--the book instead examines the way in which criminality as a category was repeatedly redefined in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey between 1840 and 1940. By the turn of the twentieth century, the book argues, criminality had become a political rather than a moral category. The abstract concept most in need of legal protection had become not "the individual," "God," or even "society," but the "state." A corrupt bureaucratic functionary thus posed more of a threat to Ottoman and Turkish self definition than a murderer, an apostate, or a sexual deviant. "Legislating Authority" sees the culmination of this trend in the early Turkish Republican adoption of Mussolini's fascist code of criminal law--a key moment in the development of Turkey's intrusive state structure. It also, however, positions these trends and their culmination within a framework of international comparison. The Ottoman and Turkish experience, it demonstrates, was very much part of a larger global transformation, and legal reform in this part of the modern Middle East was nothing if not "normal."""