Ahmed Rıza Bey's Positivist and Anticolonial World Order

Ahmed Rıza Bey (1858–1930) is famous for being a statesman and early leader of the Committee of Union and Progress, as well as a positivist thinker. He has often been studied as such: indeed, a considerable amount of literature focuses on his scientific political thinking and his efforts in domestic politics. Here, however, I would like to present an understudied aspect of his thought: that is, his anti-colonialism. Ahmed Rıza's thought was characterized by his sharp criticisms of European colonialism and by a broader critique of the capitalist world order. In the field of Ottoman studies, he is often characterized simply as a positivist who merely followed his main influences, Auguste Comte and Pierre Laffitte. In fact, he was an original thinker, who reimagined Comte and Laffitte's positivism in order to develop a critique of European imperialism, constructing a form of anti-colonial solidarity most exemplified by his 1922 work La Faillite morale de la politique occidentale en Orient [The Moral Bankruptcy of Western Policy in the East].¹ To foreground the discussion of this text, I will first summarize the political principles of positivism on an international level, and then move on to Ahmed Rıza's particular intervention.

In the history of philosophy, positivism denotes the doctrine founded by Auguste Comte (1798–1857), a systemization of thought which extends scientific thinking to all realms of knowledge.² This included not only the sciences, but also morality. According to Comte, if the world had not yet been able to come up with a morality that would universally satisfy humanity, this was because it was not yet scientific enough. This observation stemmed from his "Law of the Three Stages." According to Comte, humans initially understood and explained the world in theological terms, which formed the first stage: the will of the gods was the reason for all things. In the second stage, theology evolved into metaphysical abstractions, which Comte saw as the prevalent form in his time. The third and final stage represents the emancipation of humanity from theology and metaphysics, and humans explaining things in terms of scientific truths.³ If this stage was reached, and applied to all realms of life, it would create better lives, and by extension, better politics. However, not every place in the world was capable of this: a considerable portion of the world's population was still stuck in the second stage. These places needed a "vanguard of Humanity" that "would offer those outside sympathy, example and assistance on a strictly voluntary basis," in order for them to develop into scientific, empirically minded societies.⁴ This positivist guidance was attributed to the West, and it was this part that Ahmed Rıza had qualms about.

Ahmed Rıza observed that Europe was not as enlightened or ethical as Comte claimed it to be; for him, it had no standing as a legitimate vanguard of humanity. Thus, he modified a key connection Comte and Laffitte had made between the positivist "method" and European hegemony: he rejected their notion that a "vanguard of Humanity," located in the West, would ensure global civilizational progress.⁵ This entailed a re-evaluation of the role of the Ottoman Empire (which Comte and Laffitte regarded as a non-vanguard society) within this world system, as well as the Muslim world at large. Ahmed Rıza's project, in this sense, was more egalitarian; he aimed at constructing an altruistic world order in which all nations would have equal footing, with the help of a shared positivist enlightenment, as opposed to a hierarchical order with certain nations leading the way.⁶ While Comte argued that in the long term, non-vanguards could be able to be admitted to "the West" if and when they were ready to join it, Ahmed Rıza disagreed with this formulation as well. The point was not to have the vanguard status expand to include formerly non-vanguard countries; rather, he wanted to abolish this hierarchy altogether. If the West expanded...