This book explores the development of conservatism in Turkey. It conceptualizes the transformation of the “conservative democracy” discourse—promoted prominently during the rise to power of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2002—as a process through which conservatism ceased to be merely an intellectual ideology and became part of a mass-based political movement. This phenomenon is analyzed in relation to its political roots in the 1950s, a period marked by the emergence of ideologies shaped by the Cold War, which, although not explicitly labeled as conservative, embodied fundamentally conservative characteristics. The primary focus of the study is on the role of intellectuals in the reproduction of conservative ideology, particularly through the discourses they employed during this process.