History and Theory 57, no.

2 (June 2018), 173-194 © Wesleyan University 2018 ISSN: 0018-2656

DOI: 10.1111/hith.12056

THE ONTOLOGY OF CAPITAL: ON THE SHARED METHODOLOGICAL

LIMITS OF MODERNIZATION THEORY AND ITS CRITICS

BARIŞ MÜCEN

ABSTRACT

This article argues that critical scholarship in historical studies has not overcome the
methodological limits of modernization theory for failing to question the ontological prin-
ciples that construct its object of analysis. I call these principles the “ontology of capital”
and explicate them through Bourdieu’s conceptualization of the field and capital. I argue
that this ontology is established according to a distribution model in which social entities
come into the analysis with the amount and value of the capital they hold. This model
grasps all social relations in the form of competition, and actors and actions enter into the
analysis only when they are involved in such relations. I then analyze Bernard Lewis’s The
Emergence of Modern Turkey, which is written explicitly from a modernization perspec-
tive, to show how the principles of the “ontology of capital” operate in this text. The analy-
sis focuses on how sociohistorical facts are constructed through selection and articulation
of empirical evidence that become meaningful only on the basis of this ontology. The aim
of this analysis is to show the ontology of capital that constructs the object of analysis in
Lewis’s text rather than the Eurocentric, teleological, and elitist character of his analysis
of history that critics in recent decades have addressed as problems of the modernization
paradigm. Based on this, I argue that for a productive critical approach, relational analysis,
which characterizes critical scholarship in contrast to essentialism, also has to consider the
ontological principles in a historical work to overcome methodological limits. The failure
to interrogate this ontology leads to an analytical separation in critical scholarship between
the analysis of historical reality and of alternatives to this reality. This separation not only
produces a dehistoricized analysis of the present from a critical perspective, but also turns
the alternatives into utopian models.

Keywords: Eurocentrism, essentialism, teleology, elitist historiography, modernization

theory, Bourdieu, field theory, relational analysis

INTRODUCTION

More than four decades ago, Dean C. Tipps demonstrated the inadequacy of the
notion of modernization for explaining social transformations, but also claimed
that there was no alternative approach yet that truly overcame the limits of mod-
ernization theory.1 Since then historical analyses have developed fundamental cri-
tiques of modernization theory, not only by showing its ideological implications,
but its methodological limits as well, specifically pointing toward its Eurocentric,

1. Dean C. Tipps, “Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of Societies: A Critical
Perspective,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 15, no. 2 (1973), 224.
174 BARIŞ MÜCEN

teleological, and elitist bias. Today one can easily say that modernization theory
is dead. Yet can we say that we overcame its limits? This article shares Tipps’s
observation and argues that one reason for the lack of an alternative is to be found
in a failure to interrogate the ontological principles through which modernization
theory constructs its object of analysis. This article refers to these principles as
the “ontology of capital.” This interrogation is important for a productive critical
approach whose task is, as Gurminder Bhambra put it well, “not just different
interpretations of the same facts, [but] also [to] bring into being new facts.”2
In this article, I first identify the principles of the ontology of capital on the
basis of Bourdieu’s theory of the field and capital, which exemplifies them par-
ticularly well. Then in my analysis, I demonstrate how this ontology constructs
the object of analysis of modernization theory, by using Bernard Lewis’s text
The Emergence of Modern Turkey as the material for the analysis.3 Using a work
of history enables us to see which empirical evidence is selected and how it is
articulated to demonstrate historical facts. The aim of the analysis is to show that,
rather than the Eurocentric, teleological, and elitist character of Lewis’s analysis
of history, it is the ontology of capital that constructs the object of analysis in
his text, and through this analysis, to argue that not questioning this ontology has
produced the methodological limits of critical historical analysis.
In The Craft of Sociology, Pierre Bourdieu and his colleagues emphasized the
importance of actively constructing the scientific object of analysis.4 Following
Bachelard and Canguilhem, they claimed that scientific work constructs its object
rather than working on an already given object that it then truly represents. One
of the implications of this statement is that empirical evidence cannot enter into
scientific investigation as given facts, so that their ontological status can be
determined only within the scientific work itself. Consequently, any research
includes ontological principles that determine the specific social beings, rela-
tions, or practices that can be included, and thus come into existence, in an object
of analysis. In the following, I thus consider ontology as a methodological prob-
lem rather than as a specific branch of a philosophical investigation setting up
the axiomatic principles of beings or of so-called historical stages. Understood
in this way, questioning the ontological principles of historical research involves
an interrogation of what counts as a social/historical fact or, in other words, of
the ways in which empirical evidence is selected and articulated to demonstrate
social/historical facts.
Inspired by Moishe Postone’s critique of the distribution model underlying
“traditional Marxism”5 and using Bourdieu’s theory as an explicitly developed
2. Gurminder K. Bhambra, Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and Sociological Imagination
(New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 155.
3. Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 2d ed. (London: Oxford University Press,
1968). Written in 1961 (revised in 1968 and then reprinted in 2002 with a new preface as the third
edition), this book is widely accepted as one of the exemplary models of Ottoman/Turkish historiog-
raphy written from a modernization theory perspective and has been much criticized for that. See, for
example, Erik J. Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building: From the Ottoman Empire
to Atatürk’s Turkey (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010).
4. Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Claude Chamboredon, and Jean-Claude Passeron, The Craft of Sociology:
Epistemological Preliminaries (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1991).
5. Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical
Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
 THE ONTOLOGY OF CAPITAL 175
example of the ontology of capital, I show in this article that this ontology is
established on a distribution model, that is, to explain social entities by measur-
ing their distance and difference from one another based on their respective pos-
session of particular properties. As long as this model is used as the ontological
ground for analyzing sociohistorical phenomena, I argue, the stage of history
turns into a game of competition: it shows only the actors and actions involved
in this game.
I suggest that this ontology of capital not only constructs the object of analysis
of modernization theory, but also that of the critical scholarship that has opposed
it. To make sense of this object, one should identify the question of moderniza-
tion theory. As is well known, modernization theory narrated “modern” history
as an achievement story of the West. The sources of this achievement are sought
in the so-called essential qualities of the “West,” which in turn were considered
to be the standards of being modern—or not, that is to say, of being traditional.
Critical scholarship, in its attempts to dismantle this story that legitimizes and
naturalizes the various forms of current inequality, have addressed the limits
and fallacies of such essentialist explanations, and developed, rather, relational
analyses.6 Although such critiques have been significant in opening up certain
methodological limits of modernization theory, it should be noted that the
object of analysis of modernization theory has not been those so-called entities
themselves. Instead, analysis in this vein is based on an explanation of the dif-
ference between the West/non-West by framing it as a continuum of the modern
and traditional. This difference has been considered on different scales (such as
nations or regions), posited between different types of social groups (such as eth-
nic or religious groups), and given different names (such as Europe/non-Europe,
first world/third world). Various scholarly works utilizing modernization theory
developed answers to explain what this difference is.7
Critical scholarship has problematized modernization theory by showing its
Eurocentric, teleological, and elitist bias. However, critical scholars continued
to be interested in the same difference. In contrast to modernization theory, they
conceptualized it as systemic patterns of inequality and examined the historical
formation of existing global and local hierarchies as the outcomes of historical
processes and social relations, such as: exploitation in production processes
and uneven trade relations,8 colonial violence,9 colonial relations of power,10 or
power/knowledge,11 among many others. In this way, they indeed change the
analysis from the focus on social entities to relations—but again, as moderniza-
tion theory, they end up explaining the same difference: The whole analysis starts
6. This has been one of the common lines of critical scholarship, despite the controversies among
various critical approaches, from Marxist ones to postcolonial studies.
7. As Edward Said has pointed out, what is essential in Orientalist discourse is the constant
production of an “ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and ‘the
Occident.’” Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 2.
8. For a review of various Marxist debates, see Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis:
An Introduction (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2004).
9. See, for example, Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004).
10. See, for example, Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,”
Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3 (2000), 533-80.
11. See, for example, Said, Orientalism.
176 BARIŞ MÜCEN

with this given fact of the hierarchical difference between entities, and these
hierarchies turn into the single outcome of all historical processes.
An example of this pattern of analysis in critical scholarship can be found in
Gurminder K. Bhambra’s works, which align with the literature on connected
histories. As I said earlier, the critical aim of this article parallels Bhambra’s
questioning of the selection of facts themselves rather than their interpretations.
She also claims that various critical works have not overcome the modernization
paradigm. In her book, Remaking Modernity, she problematizes the “method of
ideal typical abstraction,”12 which, according to her, characterizes comparative
historical studies. She raises the problem of Eurocentrism in such studies for
constructing ideal types with a selective use of historical facts that are associated
with Europe. She acknowledges that such abstractions “render certain intercon-
nections ‘visible’ and capable of being submitted to systematic examination,” yet
problematizes how such “systematic examination reinforces the ‘invisibility’ of
other connections that might have been the object of investigation.”13 She thus
proposes to articulate empirical evidence instead through the notion of intercon-
nections. In her later work, Connected Sociologies, she defines interconnections
as being “made up of different forms of domination, appropriation, possession
and dispossession that cannot be seen as deriving from a simple logic of capital-
ist development or expanded market relations.”14 Thus she attempts to multiply
the relations that do not follow a singular logic of capital in order to show the
complexity of historical processes that cannot be reduced to a singular model.
However, as she explicitly states throughout her study, the relations she addresses
through interconnections are chosen in order to understand the formation of cur-
rent (global) inequalities. When she says, “[c]ounter-posing the First World to
the Third World, for example, without reflecting on how the Third World has
been produced by the very same process that have created the First,”15 we see that
the notion of interconnections is useful to show that the hierarchical differences
among social entities do not originate from social phenomena that are framed as
bounded entities. She explains this hierarchical difference, for example, between
first and third worlds, by showing the multiplicity of interconnections that cannot
be reduced to any of these bounded entities.
Consequently, the multiplicity of relations results in the singular outcome of
current hierarchies, which are again observed as difference between social enti-
ties. In this case, the problem is not only in making specific relations visible and
others not, as Bhambra states, but in codifying all effective relations in history
as the ones that produce the hierarchical positioning of social entities (in various
scales, forms, and units that cannot be reduced only to Europe vs. non-Europe).
The consequence of this, which I discuss in the concluding part of this article, is
that such analysis produces in critical studies a separation of the analysis of the
12. Bhambra, Rethinking Modernity, 151.
13. Ibid. In this work, she shows how the ideal types of modernity are defined through phenomena
such as the Renaissance, the French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution, which are used to char-
acterize modernity as a European phenomenon, and argues that this leads to the systematic ignorance
of, for instance, colonial relations in most studies in historical sociology.
14. Gurminder K. Bhambra, Connected Sociologies (London: Bloomburry, 2014), 142.
15. Ibid., 145.
 THE ONTOLOGY OF CAPITAL 177
present and its past history, as the formation of current hierarchies, from the alter-
natives that are considered to be means of overcoming those hierarchies in the
present and its future history. This separation not only produces a dehistoricized
analysis of the present, but also turns the alternatives into utopian models. In this
way, the current hierarchies are naturalized as in the analyses of modernization
theory, even if their formations are historicized.
For this reason, through this article I want to point out that although a rela-
tional approach is necessary for critical analysis, it cannot by itself overcome the
limits of the modernization paradigm. It must also question the principles of the
ontology of capital that produce its object of analysis. This article highlights the
specific principles of this ontology by showing how they work in the construction
of an object of analysis. I do this for methodological reasons in order to problem-
atize studies that have taken hierarchical formations, objectified in the unequal
distribution of various properties, as the single objective outcome of historical
transformations. This is not to say that the critical questioning of inequalities is
insignificant. However, when the subject matter of challenging inequalities is
conflated with an object of analysis that merely explicates hierarchical differ-
ences, we encounter methodological limits to productive critical scholarship.

THE ANALYTICS OF THE ONTOLOGY OF CAPITAL: A READING OF BOURDIEU

In his article “What Makes a Social Class?” Bourdieu states that the “real is
relational” and continues: “[f]rom a scientific standpoint, what exists is not
‘social classes’ . . . but rather a social space in the true sense of the term . . .
the fundamental property of a space is the reciprocal externality of the objects
it encloses.”16 Bourdieu here points to the fundamental principle of a relational
analysis, which he contrasts with substantialist (or essentialist) thinking. In the
latter mode of thought, social entities (such as social classes) come into existence
prior to relations between them; thus, their difference, that is to say, the particu-
larity of their being, is derived from their so-called intrinsic qualities. The only
way to avoid this, for Bourdieu, is an analytical construction of a social space,
which he sees as the task of science.17 As is well known, Bourdieu has done this
through the notions of the field and forms of capital. The way he thus constructs
this social space as an object of analysis provides us with the main principles
of what I call “ontology of capital.”18 I will analyze this ontology in three steps,
following Bourdieu’s analytical construction of the structure, relations, and
boundaries of a field.
The analytical construction of the field is based on “discovering the main
factors of differentiation”19 that correspond to multiple forms of capital specific

16. “What Makes a Social Class? On the Theoretical and Practical Existence of Groups,” Berkeley
Journal of Sociology 32 (1987), 3.
17. Ibid.
18. Bourdieu does not explicitly discuss ontological questions in his works; however, I argue that
the way he uses the concepts of the field/capital presumes an ontology at least for analytical reasons.
19. Bourdieu, “What Makes a Social Class?,” 3.
178 BARIŞ MÜCEN

to each field.20 Bourdieu identifies the structure of a field as a “field of forces”

through the “distribution of the various forms of capital.”21 He describes capital
as an objectified form of forces that are effective in a given universe—spe-
cific “properties” that bring “strength, power and profit on their holder.”22 In
Bourdieu’s analysis, neither the properties (objectified or embodied forms of
capital) nor the social entities (such as social class, nation, and family) are seen
to have intrinsic qualities prior to social relations. Instead, he conceptualizes
capital as social energy in reified form;23 as forces that are active in the field;24 as
social relations;25 and as a composition of multiple social forces and relations.26
In this way, Bourdieu develops a distribution model that identifies variations in
the effectivity of specific properties.
Identifying the particularity of social beings on the basis of a distribution
model, even if it is a relational one, entails two ontological principles. First, as
each entity (being) in a field is identified through specific forms of capital that are
“effective” in that field, the prior analytical condition for being in the field is to
be characterized with a form of capital. In this way, we see a necessary equation
of all social beings through the same forms of capital (in their singular form or
their particular composition). Capital turns into the common ground of existence,
that is, the analytical ground of analysis on which the differences between enti-
ties can be understood. Second, being equalized on the same ground of capital,
the differentiation of social entities can be measured only through the variations
of an amount and value of a specific capital. The particularity of a social entity
can be visible in a field only by showing the degree of the effectivity of capital it
holds. Multiple forms of capital as well can be considered through the degree of
their effectivity, but this time their effectivity is measured in their composition.
In short, the distribution model equates social entities to one another through
specific forms of capital, and the differentiation of entities becomes visible only
through an unequal distribution of capital.
Bourdieu indicates that a field is not only a “field of forces”—based on a
distribution model—but also a “field of struggle.”27 He identifies two main rela-
tions that make sensible the practices on the analytical ground of a field. One is
the material struggles that are competitive relations for acquiring the appropriate
efficient forms of capital in a field. These struggles are based on practices of
agents “to increase or to conserve their capital . . . in conformity with the tacit
20. Although Bourdieu differentiates among the main forms of cultural, economic, social, and
symbolic capital, his analysis of each field relies on further definitions of capital specific to the field
under study. For instance, he analyzes the university field through intellectual and academic forms of
capital. Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).
21. Bourdieu, “What Makes a Social Class?,” 4.
22. Ibid.
23. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the
Sociology of Education, ed. J. Richardson (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 241.
24. Pierre Bourdieu and Loic J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992), 101.
25. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1984), 113.
26. Ibid., 114-115. He brings into his analysis multiple forms of capital that are effective in a
specific field whose variance in articulation produces different effects.
27. Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 101.
 THE ONTOLOGY OF CAPITAL 179
rules of the game [field].”28 For that reason, in Bourdieu’s analyses, relations
of competition work as reproductive mechanisms of a field. The other relation
Bourdieu specifies are the symbolic struggles over the valuation of the forms of
capital. According to Bourdieu, the value of capital, which is the effectivity of a
property on a specific field, is always a stake of the struggle; hence, a “genuine
inversion of the table of values”29 is possible in his theory of the field. In this
way, Bourdieu opens up the analysis to include practices that may transform
the regularities of a field. Therefore, these struggles are important in Bourdieu’s
framework for analyzing social transformations. With this emphasis on symbolic
struggles, Bourdieu seems to avoid a zero-sum game of competition in his analy-
sis. However, I would argue that his distribution model necessarily turns sym-
bolic struggles as well into relations of competition. Although symbolic struggles
are about changing or conserving the values of capital, along with the rules and
codes of the field, their effects are objectified in a new configuration of the struc-
ture of distribution. In other words, we can see the effects of symbolic struggles
only through their outcomes, which are reflected in hierarchical difference, mea-
sured through the distribution of capital, among entities. This outcome not only
codifies the actors on the continuum of winners and losers according to the value
of the capital they hold, but also translates symbolic struggles into another form
of competitive relation through which the values of capital that the actors hold
increase or decrease. Thus, symbolic struggles again take place over the structure
of distribution, yet this time concerning not the appropriation of valuable capital,
but the valorization of specific forms of capital.
This analysis of the relations of a field gives us the ontological principles that
operate in Bourdieu’s analysis. First, we see that the values and distribution of
capital are always the outcomes of incessant material and symbolic struggles,
and therefore vary, and that their variation presents us with the particularity of
a social being in an object of analysis. Second, it is this singular outcome of all
struggles reflected in the distribution model that turns all relations to the form of
competition. In both symbolic and material struggles, there is competition among
equals (in terms of qualitatively being defined by the same form of capital) yet
having unequal chances (quantitative differences) to access or valorize capital.
Thus, the dynamics of a field, and hence the possibilities of change, consist of
patterns and/or contingencies of the competition over appropriating and redefin-
ing efficient forms of capital.
Finally, in Bourdieu’s analyses we see that drawing the boundary of a field
is essential for the construction of the object of analysis. As Bourdieu says, this
requires an empirical investigation to avoid confusing the field with a given insti-
tution.30 The boundary of a field can be drawn only where capital ceases to be
effective: “The limits of the field are situated at the point where the effects of the
field cease.”31 In this sense, not only being in the field, but also being of a field is
determined by the effects of capital. Although the social entities in a specific field

28. Ibid., 99.

29. Bourdieu, Distinction, 168.
30. Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 100.
31. Ibid.
180 BARIŞ MÜCEN

are equated through the same form of capital, and differentiated through different
quantities of that capital, the particular fields are differentiated through different
forms of capital. In this way, the boundary of a field draws the boundary of the
object of analysis.
This brief reading of Bourdieu’s theory of capital shows how an object of anal-
ysis is constructed through an ontology of capital. First, social entities are equated
on the basis of specific forms of capital, and their differentiation (particularity of
their being) comes into the analysis through the distribution of capital. Second,
social change is seen as a process of competition over acquisition and revaluation
of capital. The outcome of these relations (of struggle/competition) is objecti-
fied in social hierarchies (such as of race, class, gender). Third, such objectified
forms of hierarchies, reflected in the unequal distribution of capital, turn into the
given facts that determine the way the categories, such as class, gender, race, and
nations, are used in research.
In the following I show how in Lewis’s text the hierarchical formations of
the categories of modern/traditional and West/East are established through the
ontology of capital. As Lewis does not use the notion of capital, this analysis
can be seen as a symptomatic reading, in the Althusserian sense:32 I suggest that
Bourdieu’s conceptualization of capital/field helps us to make the absence in
Lewis’s text visible and moreover to show that the absence is the constitutive
principle of the text, an inherent ontology that enables Lewis to empirically sub-
stantiate his arguments shaped by the main principles of modernization theory.

THE ONTOLOGICAL GROUND OF MODERNIZATION HISTORIOGRAPHY

In the preface to The Emergence of Modern Turkey, Lewis states, “the theme of
this book is the emergence of a new Turkey from the decay of the old” (vii).33
Lewis then seeks to show how the Ottoman Empire, as one of the forms of
Islamic (non-Western) civilization, started to decline toward inevitable collapse,
in contrast to so-called European progress, and how modern Turkey emerged
from Westernization reforms led by the Ottoman ruling elite. In this way, Lewis
uses a Westernization or modernization model that frames historical facts through
the categories of modern/traditional and Western/Oriental. Throughout the
book, a critical eye easily perceives how Lewis, using an essentialist perspec-
tive, composes a Eurocentric, teleological, and elitist/statist historical analysis
through the notions of civilization, decline/progress, and Westernization reforms.
However, as I mentioned earlier, my purpose is not to repeat such critiques, but
to show how Lewis substantiates these notions (civilization, decline/progress,
and Westernization reforms) with specific historical facts. In other words, I focus
on the historical arenas selected and evidence adduced34 by Lewis in order to see
32. Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital (London and New York: Verso, 2009).
33. Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey. As this book is the analytical material used through-
out this article, for ease of reading I will reference it henceforth only with page numbers in the text.
34. As my analysis focuses on the theoretical and analytical construction of the arguments, I do not
question the validity of these empirical/historical facts. For a review of recent literature based on new
theoretical perspectives and empirical material on late Ottoman history, see Donald Quataert, “Trends
in the History Writing of the Late Ottoman Empire,” in The New Ways of History: Development in
 THE ONTOLOGY OF CAPITAL 181
the implicit ontological presumptions that provide a theoretical unity and analyti-
cal coherence to the analysis. In this way, I show that underlying Eurocentric,
teleological, and elitist historiography, constructed on the basis of essentialist
constructions of the categories of West/East and modern/traditional, is the ontol-
ogy of capital, which does not necessarily require essentialism. Hence, avoiding
essentialism in a historical research agenda is not sufficient to overcome the
constitutive principles of the modernization paradigm.

Empirical Material: Possessed Properties

Critical scholars have predominantly defined Eurocentrism as a culturalist
and essentialist perspective that assumes the superiority of Europe over “non-
Western” societies resulting from inherent qualitative characteristics of European
culture. Thus, “Eurocentrism is a pervasive bias located in modernity’s self-
consciousness of itself. It is grounded at its core in the metaphysical belief or Idea
(Idee) that European existence is qualitatively superior to other forms of human
life,”35 or “Eurocentrism is a culturalist phenomenon in the sense that it assumes
the existence of irreducibly distinct cultural invariants that shape the historical
paths of different peoples.”36
Such Eurocentrism seems explicit when Lewis describes the specific-
ity of Western civilization with its inherent qualities and explains the so-called
“achievements” of this civilization on the basis of them. He sees the distinctive
“qualities” of this civilization in its alleged abilities to perceive the world as a
“process [that is] the tendency to view a sequence of events . . . as a process in
time . . . as a development” and as an “[organic] whole made up of interrelated
and interacting parts” (16). These qualities differentiate for Lewis Western civi-
lization from an Oriental one, yet the difference between them is substantiated
through specific objectified forms (property):
These qualities are central to the modern Western form of civilization. They are the pre-
requisites of our physical and natural sciences; they determine our vision of the individual
and the group, of man and the universe, and thus shape our institutions and our thought,
our government and our arts, our industry, our science, and—save the mark—our religion.
They make, to name but a few examples, the difference between the Western novel and
the Oriental tale, Western portraiture and Oriental miniature, Western history and Oriental
annals, Western government and Oriental rule—and perhaps between Western restlessness
and Oriental repose. (16-17, emphases mine)

In this quote, we see that Lewis points to various objective forms and lists them
as properties of modern Western civilization (our sciences, vision, government,
art, and so on). Properties are used as the manifestation of inherent qualities of
so-called Western civilization. Although Lewis uses these properties as empirical
proof of the differences between Western and Oriental civilizations, there is no

Historiography, ed. Gelina Harlaftis et al. (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010); Alan Mikhail
and Christine M. Philliou, “The Ottoman Empire and the Imperial Turn,” Comparative Studies in
Society and History 54, no. 4 (2012), 721-745.
35. Tsenay Serequeberhan, “The Critique of Eurocentrism and the Practice of African
Philosophy,” in Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader, ed. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 142.
36. Samir Amin, Eurocentrism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989), vii.
182 BARIŞ MÜCEN

empirical link that shows how those qualities are prerequisites of such proper-
ties. Here the empirical substance of the argument is the properties listed, rather
than the supposed qualities of so-called modern Western civilization. Lewis’s
analytical strategy relies on first separating the qualities and properties in order
to then link them in a specific way. Lewis first lists various properties that are
not related to one another. He includes in the list both material (such as technol-
ogy) and immaterial forms (such as ways of thinking) that enable him to cover
all possible social realms (such as politics, art, religion, knowledge). The only
claimed link that binds these different properties together is a relation of posses-
sion: “They are our properties.” In this way, the list of properties is identified and
unified in one body as a social entity (distinctive civilizations), and it is this body
that brings the distinct properties together. In turn, Lewis uses these properties as
distinctive characteristics that differentiate civilizations. Now, the properties are
not only possessed by, but also compose specific characteristics of their holder.
Each civilization is identified by a set of properties and are empirically separated
on this basis. Hence, the properties here refer both to something possessed and
to distinctive characteristics of social entities (civilizations). Only through such
objectified forms (properties) is Lewis able to present the presumed differences
between civilizations; and only in this way is the objectivity and the unity of
Western civilization empirically supported. This weak link between the quali-
ties and properties of distinct social entities has been the basis of the essentialist
constructions of West/East and modern/traditional categories. In all this, we can
see that specific material/immaterial properties, not the qualities of a so-called
European civilization, serve as empirical material through which these categories
are constructed.

Analytical Ground of Social Entities: Distribution of Capital

As Bourdieu claims, it is the efficacy of properties in their relations to one
another in a specific field that turns them into forms of capital. We are able to see
these effects (transformation of the category of property into capital) in Lewis’s
analysis of the last three centuries of the Ottoman Empire as a process of decline.
Lewis notes that his analysis aims at giving “a broad classification and enumera-
tion of some of the principal factors and processes which led to, or were expres-
sions of the decline of Ottoman government, society, and civilization” (22).
Hence, Lewis claims that he presents the empirical facts that express the process
of Ottoman decline. Lewis’s empirical material depicts decline at four levels:
military, economic, bureaucratic, and cultural/intellectual. The most explicit one,
which is, according to Lewis, also the first one to be recognized by the Ottoman
elite, is military decline. He says that this is seen most concretely in the outcome
of wars. The losses in wars are further objectified in the loss of territories.37
Lewis clearly identifies the reasons for these losses in the differences “between
the standards of training and equipment of Ottoman and European armies” (25).

37. Lewis indicates that “the treaties of Carlowitz (1699) and Passarowitz (1718) had given formal
expression and recognition to humiliating defeats of the Ottoman Empire by the Austrians and their
allies” (45). These treaties mark the first loss of territories in Ottoman history, and are considered by
many historians as the turning point that starts the process of decline.
 THE ONTOLOGY OF CAPITAL 183
He further notes that “[o]nce in the forefront of military science, they [Ottomans]
began to fall behind. The great technical and logistic developments in European
armies in the seventeenth century were followed tardily and ineffectively by the
Ottomans” (26). Here it is clear that the possession of different properties by
Ottomans versus Europeans, that is, the distribution of properties with different
qualities in the forms of military techniques/science or equipment, led to objecti-
fied outcomes of loss of wars and territories.
This analysis of decline, starting with an “objectified outcome” of a loss
taken as an empirical fact, and then explaining it on the basis of distribution of
possessed properties, is the pattern that Lewis follows in his further analysis of
decline. Economic decline is evident for Lewis as it is reflected and objectified in
economic crises (for example, devaluation of currency, 29) whose negative effect
he observes on local industries and major parts of society. He sees the immedi-
ate sources of this decline in the distribution of different sources of possession
between the Ottoman Empire and European states: the technology of production
(for example, the incompatibility of the guild system with modernized forms of
production [33-34]) and trade routes (for example, the negative impacts of the
“European voyages of discovery” on the “volume of international trade” con-
trolled by the Ottoman Empire [28]). Hence, at the economic level, we see that
the production technology and the trade routes that the Ottoman Empire owns are
no longer effective in contrast to those of the Europeans.
The bureaucratic decline in turn is visible for Lewis in the relations between
the central state and local notables. Lewis observes a significant decentralization
of state control and authority as a consequence of “the growing inefficiency and
venality of the bureaucracy [that] prevented the formation of any effective system
for the assessment and collection of taxes” (31). Here again we see, in contrast
to the efficient bureaucracy of the strong European states, that the “traditional”
bureaucratic system that the Empire maintains is no longer effective against its
“internal” enemies. Hence, the traditional bureaucratic apparatus Ottomans main-
tain weakens the central state directly against the local notables and indirectly
against the European states by contributing to economic and military decline.
Finally, Lewis observes cultural and intellectual decline most concretely in
the late eighteenth century with “a real breakdown in the cultural and intellectual
life of Turkey, resulting from the utter exhaustion of the old traditions and the
absence of new creative impulses” (35). This decline is most explicit, according
to Lewis, in the impacts of the “ideas of the French Revolution” all over the world
(73) in contrast to the lack of international influence of the ideas and artifacts
produced in the Ottoman Empire. Again, we see that the “traditional” cultural and
intellectual properties possessed by the Ottomans are incompetent and ineffective
in contrast to those of Europeans.
Lewis’s essentialist foundation in his analysis becomes most explicit when
he explains the overall reason for decline with an “attitude of mind,” namely
the feeling of “superiority and self-sufficiency” inherited from classical Islamic
civilization (34). This attitude, according to Lewis, led Ottomans to a “decline
in alertness” (26) toward the achievements and overall progress of Europeans
that are reflected in the “objectively” superior values of the properties Europeans
184 BARIŞ MÜCEN

have. Here the essentialism operates not only in terms of defining social entities
(such as civilizations, states, or societies), but also of those properties. It seems
Lewis has already assigned a superior quality to the properties of Europeans.
However, when we focus on the empirical construction of the decline argu-
ment, we see that this explicit essentialism is rather secondary. In fact, we
see that all levels of decline are set up through comparisons between specific
properties (military technology and techniques, economic production and com-
merce, bureaucratic systems having different degrees of efficiency, and cultural/
intellectual ideas and artifacts) that are used to differentiate the Ottomans and
Europeans. However, here Lewis’s aim is not simply to define two different
entities (or historical stages)—the modern and the traditional—by giving a list
of their respective properties. Rather, he constructs his object of analysis as the
decline of the Ottoman Empire in contrast to the progress of Europe by showing
the effective relations between the properties through empirically “objective” his-
torical outcomes (the loss of wars/territories, economic crises, decentralization,
and incompetence of cultural ideas and artifacts). These outcomes are substanti-
ated by referring to the visible distribution of different quantities of properties of
different qualities among social entities.

Empirical Construction of the Dichotomous Categories

What is visible in Lewis’s analysis is that the Ottoman Empire is in decline
simply because the properties it has are no longer effective in changing historical
conditions, in contrast to the ones of European states/societies, which are char-
acterized as effective and appropriate to the historical context. One can read this
distribution of properties with an absence/presence model, as Dipesh Chakrabarty
did in his problematization of Eurocentrism.38 In this model, as Chakrabarty
argues, certain properties (characteristics or possessed properties) are associated
with the categories of the modern and European, whereas the absence of such
properties constructs the opposite of these categories. Historicism, which is the
foundation of Eurocentrism according to Chakrabarty, is the translation of these
terms (absence/presence) into a spatiotemporal frame in which differences are
seen as a gap between “now” and “not yet.” As a consequence, he argues, this
“European idea of history” produces the effect of a “waiting room” for non-
Europeans.39 This highlights the principles of Eurocentrism: In this historicist
tradition, the absence/presence model shows that any social entity that is taken
as an “object of investigation,” in Chakrabarty’s words, is considered as “an
individual and unique whole” and “as something [that] develops over time.”40
Hence, Chakrabarty claims, recalling Benjamin, that the ontological assump-
tions of Eurocentrism are based on a “secular, empty, and homogeneous” space-
time model. The categories of modern/Europe and their opposites, according
to Chakrabarty, are constructed within this space-time as being hierarchically
located on a diachronic basis (“now” and “not yet”).

38. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000).
39. Ibid., 8.
40. Ibid., 23.
 THE ONTOLOGY OF CAPITAL 185
Although I share Chakrabarty’s critique of historicism, my analysis of Lewis’s
text shows that social entities emerge on the ontological ground of capital rather
than on empty space-time. In Chakrabarty’s analysis, the idea of “absence”
immediately brings up the assumption that it is the pregiven entity (in this text,
for instance, Europe or the Ottoman Empire defined by specific intrinsic quali-
ties) that lacks the appropriate properties. Second, as the so-called success of
these entities can be visible only through their properties, the properties are
assumed to have intrinsic superior qualities. However, when we examine how
the ontology of capital operates in Lewis’s empirical substantiation of his argu-
ments, we see first that it is not their so-called cultural qualities that bring the
social entities of “Europe in progress” and “the Ottoman Empire in decline” into
being. Instead, these social entities are objectified in Lewis’s analyses through
the concrete losses and gains in the military, economic, bureaucratic, and cultural
spheres. The losses of the Ottoman Empire are the initial empirical facts through
which the argument of decline is composed. We then see in the analysis that these
entities are composed, again not by their cultural qualities, but by the properties
they hold. The variations in the distribution of effective properties show us, in
the analysis, the differentiation of the entities. It is important to note that there
is no “absence” of properties here; rather, both Ottoman and European entities
are defined with their specific military, economic, bureaucratic, and cultural/
intellectual properties. The relation in Lewis’s analysis is established through
these properties. Yet the properties do not have intrinsic value; their value is
objectified only in the outcomes of the effective relations between properties.
For instance, Lewis sees the values of the ideas of the French Revolution or of
military technology only in their objective outcomes, in their effects (not in their
intrinsic characteristics). Finally, Lewis again empirically presents the objectified
outcomes of losses and gains through the redistribution of properties (territories,
economic wealth, political control, cultural/intellectual products).
Instead of an “absence” of properties in Lewis’s analysis, we see first that he
focuses on the “presence” of properties in order to define each identity. On the
basis of this presence, he equates entities on the common ground of existence.
The differentiation between them is reflected in the unequal distribution of
properties. Second, it is the effect of properties in their relations that produces
the outcome of a redistribution of properties. The (hierarchical) valuation of
the properties is then deduced from the objectified outcomes. The entities of
“Ottomans” and “Europeans” are, moreover, objectified in the outcome of losses
and gains. Properties now function like a form of capital in Bourdieu’s sense, as
a social relation whose outcomes constantly reconfigure and restructure the field
in which the social entities emerge and are objectified.41

41. Furthermore, by analyzing decline on multiple levels, Lewis identifies the entity of the
Ottoman Empire in decline as a composition of various forms of capital (military, economic, bureau-
cratic, and cultural). These forms of capital do not define the unity of the Ottoman Empire in isolation.
Rather, the overall effect of the combination of capitals produces the unity of the Ottoman Empire in
decline in the outcomes of each relation mediated through multiple forms of capital, which are dis-
tributed in different quantities and qualities in the field. The entities (European/Ottoman) constructed
through the composition of capital are again compared through these outcomes.
186 BARIŞ MÜCEN

The distribution of capital, in this way, does not define the entities in them-
selves; rather, it constitutes an empirical differentiation of the entities of Europe
and the Ottoman Empire through a specific relation (of struggle/competition).
This distribution of the quality and quantity of capital can become visible only in
a “field” as the analytical ground on which we can identify entities. It is the taken-
for-granted idea that we can identify the formation and transformation of social
entities through relations of struggle and competition that leads us to accept the
direct relation established between a loss as an empirical fact and the entity that
is identified with that loss.42 Although the outcomes of the relations of struggle/
competition appear to be self-evident historical facts, it is only from within a
particular analytical field where particular rules, regulations, and standards are
defined that one can construct the entities that lose or win. It is the outcome of
this type of relation (losing/winning) that objectifies the existence of these enti-
ties in the analysis, that is, the way they come into being in their unity.
In Lewis’s analysis we do not see so much a comparison between different
cultural qualities as an analysis of different qualities of various forms of capital.
The cultural qualities merely function in the analysis to name this combination of
forms of capital. In other words, while Lewis invokes an essentialist argument to
present the underlying reasons for decline, the object he constructs—the Ottoman
Empire in decline in contrast to Europe in ascent—relies on empirical facts
identified by the effects of capital. Hence, the objectivity, and the strength of the
argument, is established through the visible distribution of appropriate properties
that are reflected and objectified in the outcomes of relations. The (hierarchical)
differentiation of the Europeans and Ottomans is not inherent in their so-called
qualities, but emerges in a “field” composed by relations of capital.
Now we can see that in Lewis’s analysis, the category of Europe, along with
others such as West/non-West, modern/traditional, is empirically constructed
as a specific composition of capital that is constituted through the relations (of
struggle over capital) that are conditioned by such distributions of capital. Hence,
his object of analysis is not simply the history of a pregiven entity, the Ottoman
Empire. Instead, he develops the analysis of a difference between the categories
of Europe/modern/West vs. Ottoman Empire/non-West/nonmodern. The analysis
shows us that this difference is empirically constructed as an object of analysis
through an implicit category of capital: the synchronic comparisons (not a com-
parison between “now” and “not yet,” as Chakrabarty claims43) made between

42. More recent Ottoman historical scholarship has discredited the decline narrative by arguing
that one cannot make claims for an overall decline of the Ottoman Empire as an unified entity, as there
is plenty of evidence of wide variation of the impacts of historical processes on different regions and
social groups in the Empire; see, for example, Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922, 2d
ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
43. Earlier than Chakrabarty, Johannes Fabian similarly pointed to the spatialization of time as
the very foundation of the modernization paradigm that relies on a “taxonomic approach to socio-
cultural reality.” Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 15; he ends up with a “denial of coevalness.” However,
through the ontology of capital, we see that only by confirming coevalness is it possible to identify
the differences that are reflected in temporal categories. The categories of modern/traditional, Europe/
non-Europe are constructed by synchronic comparisons on the basis of distribution of capital.
 THE ONTOLOGY OF CAPITAL 187
the categorical entities are objectified through the relations and distributions of
capital, in Bourdieu’s sense. Although Lewis uses essentialist arguments, these
play the role only of a justification of hierarchical differences. The empirical
analysis of the argument of decline shows us that the categories of Europe/non-
Europe (modern/nonmodern) are objectified not so much in cultural qualities, as
many of the critics of Eurocentrism have argued, but in the permanent effects of
the forms of capital that “become objective” only with a presumed ontology of
capital. In this sense, Eurocentrism refers to capital-centrism.

The Analytical Ground of Teleological History: Objective Force of Capital

In relation to the above analysis of Eurocentrism, the teleological model can now
also be understood on the basis of the ontology of capital. As mentioned earlier,
Lewis analyzes the late Ottoman Empire through the concept of decline by point-
ing to its inevitable collapse in contrast to European progress: “Fundamentally,
the Ottoman Empire had remained or reverted to a medieval state, with a medi-
eval mentality and a medieval economy—but with the added burden of a bureau-
cracy and a standing army which no medieval state had ever had to bear. In a
world of rapidly modernizing states it had little chance of survival” (36). At first
sight, we can identify an apparent teleology in the assumption that “traditional”
social forms would necessarily decay and evolve into modern forms. However,
Lewis again relies on particular empirical facts to develop his conclusion. Lewis
proclaims the inevitability of decline (of the Ottoman Empire) in relation to a
modernizing world in which the necessary qualities of properties have changed
in a historically specific field. The argument is based on the assumption that as
long as the social entity is not composed of appropriate qualities of capital in the
field, it is doomed to extinction. Bourdieu explains this necessity with the very
specific function of capital as “a force inscribed in the objectivity of things so that
everything is not equally possible or impossible.”44
The synchronic comparisons between the Ottoman Empire and Europe enable
Lewis to conclude that the collapse of the former was inevitable, that is, not simply
a contingent outcome of the relations of struggle and competition, but a necessary
one. It is the overall effect of a field (the regularities produced by the effects of
capital) on the entity that supports the teleological vision of Lewis. In other words,
the inevitability of decline is the necessity of the field. Thus, reading Lewis’s
argument with Bourdieu’s notions of capital and field, the teleological temporality
is the result of the effect of capital, which enables its holders to reproduce their
own position and gives regularity to actions—which makes them predictable as
well. Within this framework of capital, the teleological model no longer follows
a converging model based on a necessary homogenization of different entities.45
Instead, homogenization takes place on the ontological ground by equating social
entities with specific forms of capital through which differentiation is possible.
44. Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” 241-242.
45. This was the main critical attack of the alternative or multiple modernities project (see,
for example, S. N. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 129, no. 1 [2000], 1-29; Dilip
Parameshwar Gaonkar, “On Alternative Modernities,” Public Culture 11, no. 1 [1999], 1–18), yet
studies of the modernization paradigm never relied on the actual convergence of all histories into a
Western model; on the contrary, they have analyzed the differences.
188 BARIŞ MÜCEN

As Timothy Mitchell states, “the pluralist language of alternative modernities

always presupposes an underlying unity in reference to which such variations can
be discussed.”46 The field is the implicit underlying unity that makes it possible to
identify the differences in the singular ontology of capital.
When Lewis acknowledges that after the 1870s, when the powers of the “old
order” were weakened by reforms, “only one path lay before Turkey, that of
modernization and Westernization. She could move fast or slowly, straight or
deviously; she could not go back” (128), the core of the argument is not based
on a singular line of history. Instead, Lewis underlines that Turkey, as a social
entity, is caught up in the particular complexity of relations in a certain histori-
cal social space, which Bourdieu calls the field, and its very being is defined by
this field. Though its position changes with the quality and quantity of capitals
(moving fast or slowly, in Lewis’s words), there is no other existence outside
of this field. Once this field is considered as the singular ontological ground of
analysis (and of reality), any so-called achievements of modernity (such as politi-
cal democracy or technology) turn into properties of a social entity and function
as forms of capital.

The Analytical Ground of Empirical Actors and Practices:

“Field” as the Performing Stage of History
In Lewis’s analysis, the whole dynamic of so-called Turkish history is built on a
tension of civilizational change, on the question whether a Turkish identity will
be constructed on the grounds of Western or Islamic civilization: “The growth
of the sentiment of Turkish identity was connected with the movement away
from Islamic practice and tradition, and towards Europe” (3). Given this prob-
lematic, Lewis focuses on Westernization reforms to analyze historical change
and identifies the main agents of history through the categories of reformers and
reactionaries. Reading through the lens of the critiques of “elitist” history with a
particular emphasis on Eurocentrism, such as those developed by subaltern stud-
ies, this focus on Westernization reforms in narrating social transformation and
the formation of Turkey would clearly show us that Lewis writes history from
the perspective of the ruling elites, considering society as something to be shaped
by their acts. In his analysis, one can explicitly see the exclusion of the nonelite
from the stage of history: the common characteristic of all the actors included
in the text is that they belong to the ruling elite of different ranks—such as the
sultans, bureaucratic elite, foreign (European) officers, military classes, religious
classes, and local notables. However, an analysis of Lewis’s criteria of selection
of the actors and history-making practices would show us that it is the analytical
limits of a field that determine which actions and actors are to be included in the
analysis or not.
First, it is important to note that although Lewis assigns a specific role to the
reformers, as he works on a model of progress through Westernization, he does
not present them in his analysis as the sole subjects of history. Lewis observes
that the fragility of the early Westernization reform movements of the eighteenth
46. Timothy Mitchell, “The Stage of Modernity,” in Questions of Modernity, ed. Timothy Mitchell
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 24.
 THE ONTOLOGY OF CAPITAL 189
and early nineteenth centuries were due to struggles between the so-called
reformers and reactionaries. It is not until the “suppression of the Janissaries”
(78), who are the “central repository of military power of the traditional order”
(80), that the reform movements became effective, according to Lewis. Although
the reformers are presented here as the subjects of modernization, they are not the
only subjects of this particular history. Instead, for more than a century, the so-
called traditional forces were presented as more powerful in shaping history, and
afterwards they were always significant in producing the particularity of so-called
Turkish modernization. Although Lewis expects and believes in the trajectory of
Turkish history toward Westernization/modernization (17), the “particularity” of
this history is based on the struggles and actions of these agents (both reform-
ers and reactionaries). Lewis empirically substantiates these struggles to narrate
this particular history (of modernization); hence, the subjects of history emerge
through these struggles. The particularity of this history is based on the agents
who have appropriate forms of capital in a specific political field whose stake is
acquiring central or local authority.
Although Lewis refers to the differentiation of respective worldviews and
attitudes toward Westernization when developing the categories of reformers and
reactionaries, his empirical substantiation of the positions of those agents goes
along with the respective properties that they hold. Lewis claims that although
early Westernization reforms were rather superficial (103), they had been essen-
tial for developing the reformist actors on the historical scene. Westernization
reforms such as the introduction of new Western schools or of new military
techniques and equipment, the sending of officers to Europe, or the opening of
a translation chamber,47 have produced, according to Lewis, a distinct group of
people endowed with “Western” properties (education, language, clothing, and
so on). He observes that “[t]he history of the reform movements in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries is largely concerned with the attempt by Western-
educated intellectuals to impose a Western pattern of secular political classifica-
tion and organization on the religious community of Islam” (55). Only when the
properties that compose Western-educated intellectuals turn into effective forces,
that is, into forms of capital, in the struggles against so-called reactionaries, we
see in Lewis’s narration the forces of modernization are constituted. To put it in
Bourdieusian terminology, the accumulation of these forms of capital that have
an effect on the field produces the categories of reformers and reactionaries.
Hence, it is this field that Lewis’s analysis focuses on, and this field that makes
certain actions and agents visible and effective on the stage of history.
When we consider the invisible and voiceless positions and actions of the
nonelite, we can first note that it is not their “traditional” characteristics that keep
them from the stage of history. Instead, in Lewis’s analysis, they do not enter
because they are not perceived to have appropriate forms of capital that could
have an effect on this field of struggle.48 Although there is an explicit emphasis

47. These are narrated in Lewis’s text in detail in chapter 3, “The Ottoman Reform” (74-128).
48. See, for example, Caglar Keyder’s analysis to see how this approach is replicated in a text
written from the perspective of world-systems theory. Keyder says: “The narrative [of this study] also
focuses on the relations among dominant classes and fractions, and their attempts to attain, maintain,
190 BARIŞ MÜCEN

on the ruling elite in Lewis’s account, what makes them the subject of history is
not the position itself. It is only those agents and practices that have an effect on
the outcome of struggles and take place in this particular field that are thereby
included in this history. Hence, the actions of the nonelite that Lewis excludes
can be identified in various forms, such as peasant insurgencies, workers’ move-
ments, or citizens’ influences. The actions of the nonelite would be included in
history only when they are framed within struggles that are defined by specific
forms of capital. Within the ontology of capital, they can only be included in
terms of their effects on the structures of capital. Following Ranajit Guha’s argu-
ment, one can still argue that the nonelite (subaltern) indeed had effects on this
history. However, as long as they are included through the forms of capital they
hold, they will be seen with their constant failure—as Guha observes as well.49
Reducing subaltern politics to encounters with “power holders,” where their
activity is reduced to power politics played with a certain amount and quality of
capital, minimizes their effect on history. Although Guha makes an important
theoretical intervention by separating the political domain of the subaltern from
that of the elite, he again measures this politics within the realm of this struggle,
as a competition over acquisition or valorization of forms of capital.
In this type of struggle, agents become analytically visible only when they
share the main stakes of the field and act accordingly. What brings agents to
this stage of history is identified, again using Bourdieu’s term, by the illusio of
the field, that is, the “interest/investment” of the agents in the field.50 In Lewis’s
analysis, we see that only those practices oriented toward appropriating (material
struggles) or redefining (symbolic struggles) the effective forms of capital, which
are necessary to hold or acquire political authority, are included in this history.
Bourdieu makes it explicit that the struggles of the field are based on the recog-
nition of the values and stakes of the field by the agents to the extent that they
are caught up in the field, that is, they see the game as worth playing. Reading
the actions through the analytical ground of the field would only show us that
all agents produce the structure of the field, not only by accepting the rules and
regulations of the field, but also by changing them. The struggles over reforms, in
Lewis’s work, in this sense produce the contradictions in the field; however, these
contradictions cannot lead to an overcoming of the field, but entail its constant
reproduction (whether through strategies of conserving or changing). Hence, it
is this nonhistorical use of capital that produces a historical analysis within the
framework of a field, which turns into a nonhistorical ontology of history (of
capital). More than a “elitist” analysis of history, we see in this text a history
and employ state power. The peasantry and the working class enter the picture only indirectly and
in subordinate fashion. This is because neither of the two producing classes was sufficiently strong
or organized directly to influence the outcome of the political struggle. . . . The options available to
subordinate classes were more often determined by the outcome of the struggle for supremacy than
by their own political activity.” Caglar Keyder, State and Class in Turkey (London and New York:
Verso, 1987), 4.
49. Ranajit Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” in Selected
Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1988), 42.
50. Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1998), 76-79.
 THE ONTOLOGY OF CAPITAL 191
written from the perspective of capital. All the differences/similarities, valua-
tions, actions, and outcomes in this text are empirically substantiated within the
ontology of capital, and this produces a meaningful narration of a Eurocentric,
teleological, elitist history.

THE SEPARATION OF CRITICAL ANALYSIS AND ALTERNATIVES

The analysis above was to show how the ontology of capital operates in the con-
struction of an object of analysis from within modernization theory. We have seen
that the object produced in Lewis’s analysis is an empirical construction of the
differences between social entities: the Ottoman Empire in decline and Europe in
ascent. These differences are explained and justified by Lewis with an essential-
ist, teleological, and elitist/statist language, yet the unequal distribution of forms
of capital and the struggles and competition over them, in Bourdieu’s sense, make
these differences empirically visible. Various critical studies of sociohistorical
transformations also problematized such differences and, unlike modernization
theory, have shown that these differences are systematic social hierarchies that
have been produced by discursive practices, ideological strategies, capitalist
social relations, colonial structures, and so forth. However, such studies, while
producing a different explanation for existing differences objectified on the basis
of unequal distribution of capital, have contributed to the production of a singular
object of analysis. Sharing this object of modernization theory produces a doxic
effect, in the Bourdieusian sense,51 an objectified sense of reality that is based on
the ontology of capital.
The object of analysis produced on the basis of the ontology of capital cor-
responds to that objectified reality, but the question of the transformation of this
reality is relegated to specific alternatives. As a consequence, alternatives are
conceptualized merely in their distance and difference from this “objectified real-
ity.” In this way, alternatives turn into specific particular practices,52 to resistances
to dynamics of capital,53 to objective historical failures,54 to political projections
51. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 1977).
52. For instance, David Scott points to the particular example of “ruud bwai culture and musical
practice” in postcolonial Jamaica as an “ethical practice of freedom” against the “prevailing relation-
ships of power.” He considers such practices as possible models for reconsidering “political subjec-
tivity” and “modalities of political community.” David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after
Postcoloniality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 208-215. Yet they become meaningful
and effective only in relation and opposition to relations of power. Moreover, the very existence of
such practices is not included within the analysis of the colonial regime itself, to which the whole
analysis is dedicated, but only comes afterwards as the potential model for alternatives.
53. For example, Arturo Escobar, at the end of his critical analysis of the discourse of develop-
ment, points to the literature developed during the 1980s, “which highlights the role of grassroots
movements, local knowledge, and popular power in transforming development” not only to show
“alternatives of development” but to “the entire paradigm [of development].” Arturo Escobar,
Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1995), 215.
54. For instance, Guha concludes his manifesto-style piece in Selected Subaltern Studies, after
clarifying the problematic and the category of subaltern: “the initiatives which originated from the
domain of subaltern politics were not, on their part, powerful enough to develop the nationalist move-
ment into a full-fledged struggle for national liberation,” and he defines the main aim of subaltern
192 BARIŞ MÜCEN

and choices,55 or to actualizing the so-called basic principles of humanity.56 All

these alternatives rely on a prior analysis of capitalist modernity that has produced
immense social hierarchies that are visible on the basis of a distribution model,
and then point at present or future models of social actions, groups, or historical
stages that could break this hierarchy down and replace it. Here we see an ana-
lytical separation of analysis and alternatives as they are produced in opposition
to one another. This separation is most explicit in the mode of presentation of
so-called alternatives. Usually, we see that the “alternatives” are presented at the
end of the text in a separate chapter or section. After the analysis that shows how
social hierarchies are constructed through various relations, the alternatives come
as illustrative examples that give us “hope” about change. Yet, as they are not
included in the analyses themselves, this leads only to an expectation that “social
transformation is possible.”
An interview by Terry Eagleton with Bourdieu addresses the production of
this separation of analysis and alternative, and the possible consequences of it
for critical analyses. Eagleton asks: “Couldn’t it be argued that you come out
with a notion of the whole human practice, action and language as a war, in
which players will try to increase their stakes, to invest more effectively to the
detriments of other players?”57 Eagleton initially acknowledges the “truth” of this
analysis, but then continues: “are there not other forms of discourse, other forms
of action, which you couldn’t conceptualize so easily in those agonistic terms?”
Bourdieu’s answer constitutes the underlying problem of this dichotomy. First, he
acknowledges the importance of this point, confesses that he had asked himself
this question, as it posed a problem for his theory, and mentions that their very
conversation might be an example of that which cannot be explained in agonistic
terms. Yet he continues with the following statement:
I don’t know why I tend to think in those terms—I feel obliged to by reality. My sense is
that the kind of exchange we are now engaged in is unusual. Where this happens, it is the
exception based on what Aristotle called “philia”—or friendship. . . . I tend to think that
the structures of most of the fields, most of the social games, is such that competition—a
struggle for domination—is quasi inevitable. . . . In most fields, we may observe what we
characterize as competition for accumulation of different forms of capital (religious capi-
tal, economic capital, and so on), and things being what they are, the undistorted commu-
nication referred to by Habermas is always an exception. We can achieve this undistorted
communication only by a special effort when extraordinary conditions are fulfilled.58

studies to study the “historic failure of the nation to come to its own.” Guha, “On Some Aspects of
the Historiography of Colonial India,” 42.
55. For example, Wallerstein indicates the futural possibility of an egalitarian society on the basis
of the political choices at times of crises. Yet he does not explain in his analysis how such a politi-
cal claim has been produced other than the expectation that the existing effects of inequalities might
direct people’s choices toward equality. Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis, 89-90.
56. For example, Vivek Chibber in his critique of postcolonial theory points to such principles
of basic humanity, such as self-determination and autonomy, as the sources to overcome capitalism.
Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (London: Verso, 2013), 233.
57. Pierre Bourdieu and Terry Eagleton, “Doxa and Common Life,” New Left Review, no. 191
(1992), 116.
58. Ibid. (emphases mine).
 THE ONTOLOGY OF CAPITAL 193
Here we can identify three main lines of thought, which I consider to be not
particular to Bourdieu, but as main characteristics of all studies that conduct
an analysis of the formation of hierarchies through a distribution model. First,
Bourdieu has a sense of obligation to analyze social reality as one of a “com-
petition for accumulation of different forms of capital,” which he sees as “quasi
inevitable.” Here we see the “sense of reality”59 reflected in the construction of
his object of analysis—the “field.” In this way, the limit of analysis is constructed
by the limits of the field that are the products of relations of competition for
capital. Second, he acknowledges the actuality of other forms of action, but sees
them as an “exception.” Hence, he separates those practices that cannot be made
sense of through the concepts of the field and capital, and excludes them from
the object of analysis. This separation not only clearly draws the limits of what
the effective reality is, but also turns those exceptions into an “alternative” to the
reality of capital that could be actualized “only by a special effort when extraor-
dinary conditions are fulfilled.” Hence, third, those exceptions, as alternatives to
existing reality, can be considered utopian in their totality and ineffective in rela-
tion to the present conditions of social life, as long as that “special effort” is not
made and before those “extraordinary conditions are fulfilled.” In other words,
practices that are considered to be outside of competition, which Bourdieu calls
“friendship,” become meaningful only as a contrasting category to capital, and
have no effect in the analysis of existing reality.60
In short, we see in Bourdieu’s answer the more frequent assumptions that first,
social reality is predominantly produced by relations of competition for capital;
second, the analysis of this reality is separated from its exceptions; and third,
only those practices that are seen to have an effect on this reality are included
in the object of analysis. The purpose of the critique of the ontology of capital
developed in this article is neither to demonstrate the “actuality” of those so-
called exceptional practices that are excluded from the analysis, nor to claim their
effect on existing reality. On the contrary, the problem addressed is rather the
very separation between an existing actual world and exceptional alternatives. I
suggest that this way of formulating a critique reduces our perspective to those
relations and practices that are included in the category of capital (hence social
reality is narrowed down) but also renders all relations and practices meaningful
only through this category (so that some actions acquire their meaning through
the contrast to this category: friendship, or any other so-called alternative is
understood in its contrasting relation to the relations of capital). Capital as an
ontological category not only produces the effect of a given reality constructed
only by “relations of competition, a struggle for domination,” in Bourdieu’s
words, but also translates any other form of relation into unreal, utopian, or
futural terms. The question remains: what is the material basis of a critique? Is it

59. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice.

60. Here one can hardly argue that Jürgen Habermas could overcome the problems Bourdieu is
facing, since his theory is another example of the dichotomy of critique and alternative. This is visible
both in his separation of the social world into lifeworld and system, and his proposition of a “com-
municative action” as an “ideal” of overcoming the problems posed by “system.” Jürgen Habermas,
The Theory of Communicative Action (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), volume II.
194 BARIŞ MÜCEN

only the relations of friendship, or a utopia, an idea, the good that produces the
critiques themselves? If there is no reality to that, if it is a particularity that cannot
be generalized, what is the critique of critical analyses? How does such critique
overcome the sense of limits that also marks other forms of action as utopias?

Middle East Technical University

Ankara, Turkey