This research analyzes the intellectual history and the legacy of Turkey’s progressive politics from 1960 to 1971. After the military intervention against the autocratic DP government in 1960 and the introduction of the Constitution of 1961, Turkey’s progressive intellectuals found new grounds for organizing and agitation. Drawing on the political and social theories of Antonio Gramsci, Pierre Bourdieu, and Şerif Mardin, I argue that Turkey’s progressive intellectuals waged a dual hegemonic struggle, targeting both the state elites and civil society. I further argue that this effective dual struggle was made possible due to an intellectual merge between two progressive trends of earlier decades, namely Kemalist national-liberationism and Leninist socialism. Contrary to mainstream analyses of Turkey’s leftist politics that see fractions and divisions, this study emphasizes the intellectual unity of progressive vanguard intellectuals and analyzes the reasons why and how this unity did not translate into a practical alliance. I rely primarily on the works of Dogan Avcioglu, Mihri Belli, Behice Boran, Mehmet Ali Aybar, Hikmet Kivilcimli. I show that the progressive intellectuals’ hegemonic struggle targeting the state elites faced a resounding defeat in 1971’s military intervention. On the other hand, the progressives were successful in their hegemonic struggle targeting civil society. They have facilitated the making and the growth of progressive mass movements from the mid-1960s onwards. Moreover, these mass movements emerged within the social blocs that constituted the focus of progressive political agitation: workers, students, and intellectuals. Thus, progressive intellectuals in their self-proclaimed duty of ‘spreading a new political consciousness among the masses’ achieved tremendous success. As such, while they failed in their immediate aim of capturing state power, the progressive intellectuals succeeded in setting the ideological and strategic blueprints for Turkey’s progressive social movements in the 1971-1980 period. Ultimately, my research on progressive intellectuals contributes to Turkish intellectual and social histories. It challenges the dominant narrative in Turkish intellectual historiography that analyzes the 1960s as a decade of divisiveness and fraction among progressives. Furthermore, it adds to contemporary academic and public debates on the roles and purposes of intellectuals in counter-hegemonic politics and in progressive social movements.