In this book, Ayşe Buğra turns to a critical analysis of the history and the debates of social policy in Turkey. She does this analysis in the context of the struggle of two approaches to the poverty that had accompanied the development of capitalism since the 16th century. The first approach, which puts work at the center of the value system, is skeptical about the use of public resources for social purposes and emphasizes philanthropy when it has exhausted the opportunity to explain poverty by blaming the poor. The second, rights-based approach puts society before the labor market and treats poverty as a political problem. The struggle between the two approaches is between those who try to preserve capitalism in its pure form and those who try to turn it into something else. An important contribution of the book is that it brings a new perspective to the evolution of state-society relations in Turkey throughout the history of the Republic, on the axis of this struggle; and this relation in terms of social rights.