The Intellectual Genealogy of Özalism and Neoliberalism: Reconstructing Turkey’s Political Economy Amid Crisis, Ideology, and Articulation with Global Capitalism

Turkey’s political-economic transformation in the 1980s reveals the consolidation of market-oriented thinking within state institutions. Influenced by monetarism, supply-side economics, rational expectations, public choice theory, and Hayekian liberalism, this shift found political expression in Thatcherism, Reaganism, and, in Turkey, Özalism. The January 24, 1980 Decisions marked a turning point in redefining state–market relations through capital liberalization, privatization, and the retrenchment of the social state. This study contends that neoliberalism in Turkey functioned not simply as an economic reform agenda, but as an ideological framework that reshaped political authority, institutional structures, and the normative foundations of governance.