Politics & Power Quote by Orhan Pamuk

Pamuk’s sentence reads like a novelist refusing the cheap thrill of villainy. Instead of treating “political movements” as exotic eruptions of fanaticism, he pins them to two dull, stubborn forces: material deprivation and the psychic injury of invisibility. It’s a deliberately unsensational diagnosis, and that’s the point. By locating radical energy “on the margins,” he doesn’t romanticize outsiders; he sketches a social geography where the center gets to name itself “normal” while the periphery becomes a pressure cooker.

The twin causes matter because they travel together. Poverty is not only empty pockets; it’s a daily lesson in who counts. The “feeling” of not being represented is easily dismissed as mere emotion, but Pamuk frames it as political data: legitimacy leaks when institutions stop translating ordinary lives into policy, language, and dignity. That phrasing also smuggles in a critique of official narratives that blame unrest on backwardness or ideology alone. He’s arguing, implicitly, that the state’s most dangerous product is not dissent but abandonment.

Contextually, this tracks with modern Turkey’s long tensions between secular elites and religious-conservative or nationalist currents, plus the uneven development that made Istanbul’s cosmopolitan promise feel like someone else’s country. Pamuk’s intent isn’t to absolve these movements; it’s to explain their fuel source. The subtext lands hardest on the comfortable: if you want fewer extremists, stop manufacturing citizens who feel like extras in their own republic.