Based on a critique of Şerif Mardin's periphery-center relations approach, this study presents a discursive analysis of Turkish politics. Relying on the idea that society literally represents itself, Mardin equates society with the social and claims that society consists of a center and a periphery. Using Ernesto Laclau's discursive theory of society, this study rejects the idea that society is fully representative of itself and argues that the existing society cannot encompass all meanings in the social sphere. Therefore, society can only have a center, and the fate of society depends on the monopoly of control over this center in the social field. The political, which takes the stage with the emergence of another society claim, can threaten the existing social reality by revealing its contingency in representing the metaphorical totality of society. From a discourse theory perspective, then, political analysis should focus not on what society is, but on what prevents society from being society. Based on this understanding of society, this study aims to analyze the emergence and expansion of Kemalist "society" as well as its crises in the period up to the 1980s with different claims to society.
