Author's note: I thank Fadi A. Bardawil and the four anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

¹ For a good introduction to the work of Althusser, see Callinicos, Alex, Althusser's Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

² ʿAmil's first two books, published in 1972, form the theoretical backbone of his approach; see Fi al-Tanaqud (On Contradiction) (Beirut: Dar al-Farabi, 1973) and Fi Namat al-Intaj al-Kuluniyali (On the Colonial Mode of Production) (Beirut: Dar al-Farabi, 1976). These were followed by the last installment of his trilogy, published posthumously, Fi Tamarhul al-Tarikh (On the Stages of History) (Beirut: Dar al-Farabi, 2001). More pronounced political or even polemical positions were taken in his later books, also discussed in this article. In addition to his theoretical and political production, ʿAmil published two poetry books and a series of articles, mostly on education in al-Tariq. All of the books were published in Beirut by Dar al-Farabi. Original publication dates will be stated in the text. All translations of ʿAmil are mine.

³ Tareq Y. Ismael is dismissive of the intellectual production of Arab communist parties: “In practice, however, the majority of the analytical literature of Arab communist parties is notable for its inability to make any significant theoretical contributions to social thought. Arab Communist literature . . . tended to be uncritical in content.” The Communist Movement in the Arab World (Oxford: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005), 102. The work of ʿAmil introduces some nuances to this sweeping judgment.

⁴ For examples of these commemorations, see issues of al-Tariq in 1987, 1988, 1990, 1997, 2000, and 2003. For a presentation of ʿAmil's work in English, see Abu-Rabiʾ, Ibrahim M., “Mahdī ʿĀmil and the Unfinished Project of Arab Marxist Philosophy,” in Contemporary Arab Thought: Studies in Post-1967 Arab Intellectual History (London: Pluto Press, 2003), 318–43Google Scholar. On Arab political thought, see, for example, Abdel-Malek, Anouar, Contemporary Arab Political Thought (London: Zed Books, 1984)Google Scholar; Ajami, Fouad, The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice since 1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Aksikas, Jaafar, Arab Modernities: Islamism, Nationalism, and Liberalism in the Post-colonial Arab World (New York: Peter Lang, 2009)Google Scholar; Binder, Leonard, Islamic Liberalism: A Critique of Development Ideologies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Browers, Michaelle L., Political Ideology in the Arab World: Accommodation and Transformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hourani, Albert, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kassab, Elizabeth Suzanne, Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Meijer, Roel, The Quest for Modernity: Secular Liberal and Left-Wing Political Thought in Egypt, 1945–1958 (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002)Google Scholar; Salem, Paul, Bitter Legacy: Ideology and Politics in the Arab World (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; and Schumann, Christoph, Liberal Thought in the Eastern Mediterranean: Late 19th Century until the 1960s (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ Abu-Rabiʾ, Contemporary Arab Thought.

⁶ Hourani was quite clear in the preface to his 1983 edition of Arabic Thought in a Liberal Age that most of the intellectuals he discussed were “derivative thinkers of the second or third rank of importance” (v).

⁷ Ajami, The Arab Predicament, 4.

⁸ Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 9Google Scholar.

⁹ Makdisi, Saree, “‘Postcolonial’ Literature in a Neocolonial World: Modern Arabic Culture and the End of Modernity,” Boundary 22 (1995): 85–115CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ Aksikas, Arab Modernities, 154.

¹¹ Mignolo, Walter, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 173Google Scholar. On the notion of “traveling theory,” see Said, Edward W., “Traveling Theory,” in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; and “Travelling Theory Reconsidered,” in Critical Reconstructions: The Relationship of Fiction and Life, ed. Robert M. Polhemus and Roger B. Henkle (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994).

¹² Gershoni, Israel, “The Theory of Crisis and the Crisis in a Theory: Intellectual History in Twentieth-Century Middle Eastern Studies,” in Middle East Historiographies: Narrating the Twentieth Century, ed. Gershoni, Israel, Singer, Amy, and Erdem, Y. Hakan (Seattle, Wash: University of Washington Press, 2006), 131–82Google Scholar.

¹³ Scott, David, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ Scott, David, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 4Google Scholar.

¹⁵ For a study of Arab intellectual history from this perspective, see Bardawil, Fadi A., When All this Revolution Melts into Air: The Disenchantment of Levantine Marxist Intellectuals (New York: Columbia University, 2010)Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs, 174.

¹⁷ Mahdi ʿAmil, Munaqashat wa-Ahadith: Qadaya Harakat al-Taharrur al-Watani wa-Tamyiz al-Mafahim al-Marksiyya ʿArabiyyan (Discussions and Conversations: On the National Liberation Movement and the Arabic Concretization of Marxist Concepts) (Beirut: Dar al-Farabi, 1990), 241. This collection of essays was published posthumously.

¹⁸ See Laroui, Abdallah, L'Idéologie Arabe Contemporaine (Paris: François Maspero, 1982)Google Scholar; and The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual: Traditionalism or Historicism? (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif.: University of California Press, 1976). For a different take on the “Arabization” of Marxism, see al-Hafiz, Yasin, “Taʿrib al-Marksiyya” (The Arabization of Marxism) in al-Aʿmal al-Kamila li-Yasin al-Hafiz (Beirut: Markaz Dirasat al-Wihda al-ʿArabiyya, 2005), 321–27Google Scholar.

¹⁹ ʿAmil, Munaqashat wa-Ahadith, 18–22.

²⁰ Ibid., 62.

²¹ Ibid., 236–37.

²² For a similar argument made by dependency theorists, see Frank, Andre Gunder, “The Development of Underdevelopment,” Monthly Review 18 (1966): 17–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²³ ʿAmil, , al-Nazariyya fi al-Mumarasa al-Siyasiyya: Bahthun fi Asbab al-Harb al-Ahliyya fi Lubnan (Theory in Political Practice: An Inquiry into the Causes of the Lebanese Civil War) (Beirut: Dar al-Farabi, 1990)Google Scholar.

²⁴ The Lebanese civil war was preceded by a series of strikes and social movements in the late 1960s, culminating in the symbolic Ghandour strike in November 1972, which left several militants dead. Student unrest accompanied these social movements, contributing to the social ebullition of the Lebanese society prior to the war. This social unrest was grafted onto a political crisis generated by the sclerosis of the Lebanese political system and its sectarian nature. For more details, see Traboulsi, Fawwaz, A History of Modern Lebanon (London: Pluto Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

²⁵ The Second Congress of the Lebanese Communist Party, held in Beirut in 1968, was a pivotal moment in the history of the party, marking a transformation in its political positions. The congress set the stage for the interpretation of the regional situation as a rift between the Arab national liberation movements and the alliance of imperialism, Zionism, and Arab reactionary regimes. This analysis called for unity among the various components of the Arab liberation movements and among the world's three main anti-imperialist forces, namely, the world socialist system, the revolutionary workers' movement in the capitalist countries, and the world national liberation movement. In this context, the party recognized the right of the Palestinian resistance movement after a long period of ambiguity on that matter. For more on the LCP, see Ismael, Tareq Y. and Ismael, Jacqueline S., The Communist Movement in Syria and Lebanon (Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 1998)Google Scholar.

²⁶ For an overview of these radical forces, see Ismael, Tareq Y., The Arab Left (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1976)Google Scholar.

²⁷ In the context of Latin American intellectual history, Mignolo writes of “genealogies [that] are regularly broken by a new wave of ideas and intellectual production from the center of the world system (in German, French, and English).” Local Histories/Global Designs, 56.

²⁸ Ibid., 11.

²⁹ The twofold dimension of this intellectual move has some affinities with Pierre Bourdieu's description of the political field, whose stakes are about the “monopoly of the capacity to make see and make believe differently,” highlighting the double nature of a political act as both an intervention in a field and an attempt to alter “the principles of vision and division of the social world.” Propos sur le Champ Politique (Lyon, France: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2000), 67–68.

³⁰ Abdallah Laroui had already noted the centrality of a certain understanding of Marxism to Arab thought, a centrality that was grounded in Marxism's capacity to salvage a kind of unity between the Orient and the West, deny tradition without surrendering to Europe, and provide a form of praxis that would unify subjective truth and popular belief. See L'Idéologie Arabe Contemporaine and The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual.

³¹ Christofferson, Michael Scott, French Intellectuals against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 19Google Scholar. For the impact of this antitotalitarian moment on some Lebanese intellectuals, see Bardawil, When All this Revolution Melts into Air.

³² For ʿAmil's take on the essentialist reading of sects and his critique of the writings of Michel Chiha, one of the main Lebanese nationalist ideologues, see Madkhal ila Naqd al-Fikr al-Taʾifi: al-Qadiyya al-Filastiniyya fi Idiyulujiyyat al-Burjwaziyya al-Lubnaniyya (A Prolegomenon to the Critique of Sectarian Thought: The Palestinian Cause in the Ideology of the Lebanese Bourgeoisie) (Beirut: Dar al-Farabi, 1989 [1980]). For his discussion of the Marxist conception of sectarianism, see Fi al-Dawla al-Taʾifiyya (On the Sectarian State) (Beirut: Dar al-Farabi, 2003), first published in 1986. ʿAmil focuses on the work of Masʿud Dahir, a Marxist historian who analyzed the sectarian question. See Dahir, Masʿud, al-Usus al-Tarikhiyya li-l-Masʾala al-Taʾifiyya (The Historical Roots of the Lebanese Confessional Question) (Beirut: Institute for Arab Development, 1986)Google Scholar.

³³ Firro, Kais M., Inventing Lebanon: Nationalism and the State under the Mandate (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 60Google Scholar.

³⁴ Said, Edward W., Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979)Google Scholar.

³⁵ ʿAmil, Fi al-Dawla al-Taʾifiyya, 178. For a conception of sectarianism that comes to similar political conclusions, despite its theoretical differences, see Makdisi, Ussama, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

³⁶ ʿAmil, Madkhal ila Naqd al-Fikr al-Taʾifi, 259. By defining sects as political relations, ʿAmil denies any relation between sects and classes, another thorny Marxist debate within the Lebanese left; in his view, sects do not exist at the level of relations of production, which are solely the domain of class.

³⁷ The function of social control is achieved and reproduced by the state and its apparatuses. ʿAmil takes this insight from Poulantzas' “isolation effect.” See Jessops, Bob, The Capitalist State: Marxist Theories and Methods (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), 163–64Google Scholar.

³⁸ ʿAmil, Fi al-Dawla al-Taʾifiyya, 193–208.

³⁹ ʿAmil, Munaqashat wa-Ahadith, 125.

⁴⁰ ʿAmil, al-Nazariyya fi al-Mumarasa al-Siyasiyya, 158. ʿAmil continues by stripping the bourgeoisie of any progressive apparatus, denying the possibility that this bourgeoisie might be a vanguard of secularism: “if secularism was a sign of the capacity of the European bourgeois state to be a bourgeois state, then ‘sectarianism’ is a sign of the incapacity of the colonial bourgeois state to be a bourgeois state.” ʿAmil, Madkhal ila Naqd al-Fikr al-Taʾifi, 39.

⁴¹ ʿAmil, al-Nazariyya fi al-Mumarasa al-Siyasiyya, 37–38.

⁴² ʿAmil takes Balibar's Cinq Etudes du Matérialisme Historique (Paris: Maspero, 1974) as his main entry point for criticizing structuralism. See ʿAmil, Fi Tamarhul al-Tarikh.

⁴³ Ibid., 56. A similar point is made by Laroui in his defence of historicism: “Those who criticize historicism as a philosophy—I refer in particular to the Frenchman L. Althusser—are interested primarily in a rationale of understanding: they take as models the exact sciences, which presume an eternal present and a homogenous milieu. A society that believes itself to be at the apogee of evolution and that strives to preserve the equilibrium it imagines it has attained will experience no difficulty in transposing such a rationale to the social and human sciences. But a society that rejects its present, that lacks homogeneity, that feels itself to be different from those cultures that appear to be in the ascendant, will rediscover historicism as the theoretical justification for its course of actions, sometimes in the guise of Marxism.” Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, x.

⁴⁴ Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon, 229.

⁴⁵ al-Hafiz, Yasin, “Harb Taʾifiyya am Taqadummiyya wa-ʿIlmaniyya?” (A Sectarian War or a Progressive and Secular One?), in al-Aʿmal al-Kamila li-Yasin al-Hafiz (Beirut: Markaz Dirasat al-Wihda al-ʿArabiyya, 2005), 1117–38Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ ʿAmil, Mahdi, Naqd al-Fikr al-Yawmi (Beirut: Dar al-Farabi, 1989)Google Scholar. This collection of essays was published posthumously in 1987.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 16–28.

⁴⁸ ʿAmil, Fi al-Dawla al-Taʾifiyya.

⁴⁹ ʿAmil, al-Nazariyya fi al-Mumarasa al-Siyasiyya, 77–78.

⁵⁰ Ibid., 41–44.

⁵¹ ʿAmil, Naqd al-Fikr al-Yawmi.

⁵² al-Azm, Sadiq Jalal, “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse,” Khamsin 8 (1981): 5–26Google Scholar.

⁵³ ʿAmil, Naqd al-Fikr al-Yawmi, 155–70.

⁵⁴ Ibid., 156–86.

⁵⁵ ʿAmil, Mahdi, Azmat al-Hadara al-ʿArabiyya am Azmat al-Burjwaziyya al-ʿArabiyya? (Beirut: Dar al-Farabi, 2002), 220Google Scholar. Emphasis in original.

⁵⁶ Ibid., 58.

⁵⁷ For some Arab intellectual reactions to Said, see al-Azm, “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse”; Saghiyyah, Hazem, Thaqafat al-Khumayniyya (Khomeinist Cultures) (Beirut: Dar al-Jadid, 1995)Google Scholar; and Sivan, Emmanuel, “Edward Said and His Arab Reviewers,” in Interpretations of Islam: Past and Present (Princeton, N.J.: Darwin Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ ʿAmil, Mahdi, Hal al-Qalb li-l-Sharq wa-l-ʿAql li-l-Gharb?Marks fi Istishraq Idwar Saʿid (Beirut: Dar al-Farabi, 2006), 7–10Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ Ibid., 48.

⁶⁰ Ibid., 19. In ʿAmil's reading of Said, thought becomes necessarily dominating and is opposed to some pretheoretical “human identity.” Said writes on Marx: “We are immediately brought back to the realization that Orientalists . . . conceive of humanity either in large collective terms or in abstract generalities. Orientalists are neither interested in nor capable of discussing individuals . . . Marx is no exception. The collective Orient was easier for him to use in illustration of a theory than existential human identities. . .. That Marx was still able to sense some fellow feeling, to identify even a little with poor Asia, suggests that something has happened before the labels took over, before he was dispatched to Goethe as a source of wisdom on the Orient.” Said, Orientalism, 166.

⁶¹ ʿAmil, Hal al-Qalb li-l-Sharq wa-l-ʿAql li-l-Gharb?, 61–62.

⁶² Ibid., 67–69.

⁶³ Ibid., 39.

⁶⁴ Ibid., 72. Emphasis in original.

⁶⁵ Gershoni, “The Theory of Crisis and the Crisis in a Theory,” 146.

⁶⁶ Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs, 174.

⁶⁷ Scott, Conscripts of Modernity, 29.

⁶⁸ Ibid., 175.