Özet:

In the 1960s cultural-particularistic analysis started to gain currency in social sciences and humanities weakening the popularity of the once-dominant universalist paradigm. The problems of societies and reactions to those problems were explained with reference to culture in the wide sense of the concept. In this sense, it was assumed that the radical social movements of the era erupted because of rapid change, which led to the erosion of traditional value system and, thus, long-standing cultural structures of societies. This article through focusing on the political youth movement of the 1960s and 1970s in Turkey, aims at discussing the impact of this approach with its theoretical and methodological implications. The research and analyses adopting this new approach tended to indicate the interventions of the Kemalist centre to the conservative-authentic periphery as the main source of the social conflicts in Turkish society. According to this viewpoint, these interventions eroded the traditional values and structures but failed to replace them with the new ones. The radical youth movement was interpreted in the same vein and presented as the outcome of this social deterioration and value crisis. The analyses adopting this outlook through solely focusing on the political violence between the leftists and rightist student groups offered the argument that their relations with their fathers or their adolescence problems were the psychological backgrounds of the violence among the young people. In this type of interpretation the conflict between the modern centre and conservative periphery emerges as the 'primary conflict' while the political activism of the youth as secondary, dependent on the former. Here, it is argued that this reading of the radical movements neglected the role of the attitudes and policies of the state and labelled radicalization as a social and psychological abnormality.

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