¹ Batatu, Hanna, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study of Iraq's Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of Its Communists, Baʿthists, and Free Officers (Princeton, 1978), 722Google Scholar. The monumental book was originally published in three volumes, comprising three parts in the massive edition cited here, which remains an unmatched work of Middle East social history.

² Batatu would later complete a comparably magnificent book on Syria, which still stands among the most important works of modern Syrian Studies, published, tragically, just before Batatu's untimely death. See Batatu, Hanna, Syria's Peasantry, the Descendants of Its Lesser Rural Notables, and Their Politics (Princeton, 1999)Google Scholar.

³ Batatu, Old Social Classes, 730. I remark here upon how unremarkable it was for friends, acolytes, and enemies to refer to ʿAflaq as a teacher. See, for example, al-Mardīnī, Zuhayr, al-Ustādh: qiṣṣat ḥayāt Mishil ʿAflaq (London, 1988)Google Scholar.

⁴ Said, Edward W., Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York, 1975)Google Scholar; Foucault, Michel, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 2, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. Faubion, James D. (New York, 1998), 369–91Google Scholar.

⁵ See Ḥalīm Ḥanna Asmar, al-Shakhṣānīyya fi al-fikr al-ʿarabī al-muʿāṣir: Renay Ḥabashī wa-Muḥammad ʿAzīz al-Ḥabābī (Personalism in Contemporary Arab Thought: René Habachi and Muḥammad ʿAzīz al-Ḥabābī) (n.p., 2007). While I am unaware of any detailed study of what I call “Arabic personalism(s),” Robyn Creswell discusses Charles Malik and the Cénacle libanais in relation to Arabic poetic modernism in his City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut (Princeton, 2018). On the relationship among personalism, Charles Malik, and human rights see Moyn, Samuel, “Personalism, Community, and the Origins of Human Rights,” in Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig, ed., Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2010), 85–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Moyn, Christian Human Rights (Philadelphia, 2015)Google Scholar. There are many other figures in modern Arab/ic and Middle East intellectual history worthy of comparative study in this connection, including Antūn Saʿādah and Zakī al-Arsūzī, just to name two.

⁶ Hellman, John, “The Opening to the Left in French Catholicism: The Role of the Personalists,” Journal of the History of Ideas 34/3 (1973), 381–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hellman, Emmanuel Mounier and the New Catholic Left, 1930–1950 (Toronto, 1981)Google Scholar.

⁷ This is a tendentious translation, one for which I advocate here and elsewhere, cognizant of the fact that the term is a referent for many things: “coup d’ é tat,” “overthrow” and “seizure” (of power), just to name a few relevant translations drawn from the mid-twentieth-century Baʿthist lexicon.

⁸ Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (New York, 2003).

⁹ Joseph Ilyās claims that ʿAflaq was born in 1912, not 1910, and that ʿAflaq himself propagated the “mistake” (sahw) so that he could matriculate at school in France earlier. Ilyas, Joseph, ʿAflaq al-Adīb: Dirāsa fī adabiyyat ʿAflaq (The Well-Mannered Intellectual: A Study in the Manners of Michel ʿAflaq) (Beirut, 1994)Google Scholar, 20 n. 1. The word adīb can mean a literary writer but it also harks to the venerable Islamic tradition of adāb.

¹⁰ Hourani, Albert, “Ottoman Reform and the Politics of Notables,” in Polk, William R. and Chambers, Richard L., eds., Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1968), 41–68Google Scholar; Khoury, Philip S., Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: The Politics of Damascus, 1860–1920 (Cambridge, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hudson, Leila, Transforming Damascus: Space and Modernity in an Islamic City (London, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ I am inspired here by Wilder, Gary, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude & Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago, 2005)Google Scholar.

¹² The third “founding father” of the Baʿth, Zakī al-Arsūzī, also studied (philosophy) at the Sorbonne just a few years before ʿAflaq and al-Bitar.

¹³ On the evolution of Syrian nation-state nationalism in its bourgeois and populist formations see Khoury, Philip S., Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics of Arab Nationalism, 1920–1945 (Princeton, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gelvin, James L., “The Social Origins of Popular Nationalism in Syria: Evidence for a New Framework,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 26/4 (1994), 645–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thompson, Elizabeth, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York, 2000)Google Scholar; Sluglett, Peter, “Will the Real Nationalists Stand Up? The Political Activities of the Notables of Aleppo, 1919–1946,” in Méouchy, Nadine, ed., France, Syrie et Liban, 1918–1946: Les ambiguïtés et les dynamiques de la relation mandataire: Actes des journées d’études organisées par le Cermoc et L'Ifead, Beyrouth, 27–29 Mai 1999 (Damascus, 2002), 273–90Google Scholar; Provence, Michael, “A Nationalist Rebellion without Nationalists? Popular Mobilizations in Mandatory Syria 1925–1926,” in Méouchy, Nadine and Sluglett, Peter, eds., The British and French Mandates in Comparative Perspectives (Leiden, 2004), 673–92Google Scholar. For the radicalization of “the Baʿth generation” see Schumann, Christoph, Radikalnationalismus in Syrien und Libanon: Politische Sozialisation und Elitenbildung 1930–1958 (Hamburg, 2001)Google Scholar; , Schumann, “The ‘Failure’ of Radical Nationalism and the ‘Silence’ of Liberal Thought in the Arab World,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 28/3 (2008), 404–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ I address the problem of “minority” and “minorities” in the intellectual history of postcolonial Syria in my “Mosaic, Melting Pot, Pressure Cooker: The Religious, the Secular, and the Sectarian in Modern Syrian Social Thought,” in Jens Hanssen and Max Weiss, eds., Arabic Thought against the Authoritarian Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Present (Cambridge, 2018), 181–202.

¹⁵ Al-Bīṭār espoused a kind of scientific Marxism with more Nasseristic pan-Arabism. Although al-Bīṭār would briefly reconcile with Hāfiẓ al-Asad during the late 1970s, he was assassinated in Paris in 1980, where he had been living in exile. And while it has never been legally substantiated, the claim has been made that the regime had something to do with the action. al-Bitar, Salah al-Din, “The Major Deviation of the Ba'th Is Having Renounced Democracy,” MERIP Reports 110 (Nov.–Dec. 1982), 21–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ With ʿAflaq and al-Bīṭār effectively purged from the country, Zakī al-Arsūzī, an ʿAlawī from the northwestern coastal province of Alexandretta, became one of the chief intellectual resources for the Baʿth Party during the 1970s and 1980s, as Ḥāfiẓ al-Asad and his allies consolidated their grip on power and the ʿAflaqists were increasingly demonized, marginalized, and even forgotten in Syria. For a preliminary introduction to the writings of Zakī al-Arsūzī see Arsuzi-Elamir, Dalal, “Nation, State, and Democracy in the Writings of Zaki Al-Arsuzi,” in Schumann, Christoph, ed., Nationalism and Liberal Thought in the Arab East: Ideology and Practice (London, 2010), 66–91Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Babikian proposed that the figure the most influential on ʿAflaq's oeuvre was André Gide, and secondarily Ibn Khaldun. Babikian, N. Salem, “A Partial Reconstruction of Michel Aflaq's Thought: The Role of Islam in the Formulation of Arab Nationalism,” Muslim World 67/4 (1977), 280–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ Paul Berman, “Baathism: An Obituary,” New Republic, 14 Sept. 2012, at https://newrepublic.com/article/107238/baathism-obituary.

¹⁹ In a gleeful obituary of the Baʿthist regime in Iraq following its destruction by US occupation forces in 2003–4, Berman pre-iterated his callous interpretation. See Berman, Paul, Terror and Liberalism (New York, 2004)Google Scholar.

²⁰ Patterson, David, A Genealogy of Evil: Anti-Semitism from Nazism to Islamic Jihad (Cambridge, 2011), 226Google Scholar.

²¹ Ibid., 226, my emphasis. Note the psycho-projection onto their “mind.” In order to better contextualize Patterson's mind see Patai, Raphael, The Arab Mind (New York, 1973)Google Scholar.

²² Achcar, Gilbert, The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab–Israeli War of Narratives (New York, 2010), 65–74Google Scholar. Achcar can be devastating: “Nothing indicates that Michel Aflaq had the least affinity for Nazism in his student days in France, unless one assumes that his purchase of a Nazi best seller proves that he was fascinated by Nazi doctrine.” Ibid., 67.

²³ Berman, “Baathism: An Obituary.”

²⁴ del Bayle, Jean Louis Loubet, Les non-conformistes des années 30: Une tentative de renouvellement de la pensée politique française (Paris, 1969)Google Scholar; Hellman, John, Emmanuel Mounier and the New Catholic Left, 1930–1950 (Toronto, 1981)Google Scholar; Sternhell, Zeev, Ni Droite, ni gauche: L'idéologie fasciste en France (Paris, 1983)Google Scholar; translated as Sternhell, Zeev, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (Berkeley, 1986)Google Scholar; Wolin, Richard, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism, From Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton, 2004), 193–4Google Scholar; Winock, Michel, La trahison de Munich: Emmanuel Mounier et la grande débàcle des intellectuels (Paris, 2008)Google Scholar. More recently, personalism has found a contemporary champion in op-ed columnist David Brooks. See his “Personalism: The Philosophy We Need,” New York Times, 15 June 2018, at www.nytimes.com/2018/06/14/opinion/personalism-philosophy-collectivism-fragmentation.html.

²⁵ Sternhell, Ni droite, ni gauche.

²⁶ Hellman, Emmanuel Mounier and the New Catholic Left, 85. There is much to learn about Bergson in translation in Diagne, Souleymane Bachir, “Bergson in the Colony: Intuition and Duration in the Thought of Senghor and Iqbal,” Qui Parle 17/1 (2008), 125–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁷ Hellman, Emmanuel Mounier and the New Catholic Left, 86.

²⁸ Ibid., 252.

²⁹ The two men may very well have met in person at some point, though I have yet to unearth any such evidence.

³⁰ Loubet del Bayle, Les non-conformistes des années 30, 139.

³¹ Moyn, “Personalism, Community, and the Origins of Human Rights,” 88.

³² Loubet del Bayle, Les non-conformistes des années 30, 339. The scholarship of Loubet del Bayle others demonstrates the splintering of personalism into multiple personalisms, including the “heroic personalism” of l'ordre nouveau, the “spiritual personalism” of Mounier and the Esprit group, and the “aristocratic personalism” of Thierry Maulnier and others.

³³ Mounier, Emmanuel, “Refaire la renaissance,” Esprit 1/1 (1932), 5–51Google Scholar, at 7.

³⁴ Mounier, Emmanuel, “Qu'est-ce que le personnalisme?” Esprit 3/27 (1934), 357–67Google Scholar, at 357.

³⁵ Ibid. 358.

³⁶ Ibid. 359.

³⁷ Ibid. 361.

³⁸ Ibid. 361, emphasis in the original.

³⁹ Ibid. 367.

⁴⁰ Kosicki, Piotr H., “L'avènement des intellectuels catholiques: Le mensuel Więź et les conséquences polonaises du personnalisme mounierien,” Vingtième siècle: Revue d'histoire 102/2 (2009), 31–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 31; Nguyen, Phi Vân, “The Vietnamization of Personalism: The Role of Missionaries in the Spread of Personalism in Vietnam, 1930–1961,” French Colonial History 17 (2017), 103–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I thank Esmet Elhalabi for this second reference.

⁴¹ Wehr, Hans, A Dictionary of Modern Arabic, 4th edn (Ithaca, 1994), 80Google Scholar.

⁴² Djaït, Hichem, La personnalité et le devenir arabo-islamiques (Paris, 1974), 67Google Scholar

⁴³ Raouf, Wafik, “Le Ba^th depuis quarante ans,” L'Afrique et l'Asie modernes, 154 (Autumn 1987), 33–45Google Scholar, at 35–6.

⁴⁴ Batatu, The Old Social Classes, 731, cited in Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust, 70.

⁴⁵ Batatu, The Old Social Classes, 730–31.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 736.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 731, my emphasis.

⁴⁸ Kaylani, Nabil M., “The Rise of the Syrian Baʿth, 1940–1958: Political Success, Party Failure,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 3/1 (1972), 3–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 22.

⁴⁹ Binder, Leonard, “Radical-Reform Nationalism in Syria and Egypt I,” Muslim World 49/2 (1959), 96–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 99–100.

⁵⁰ ʿAflaq, Michel, “Fi al-qawmiyya al-ʿarabiyya,” in ʿAflaq, Fi Sabīl Al-Baʿth (Beirut, 1959), 25–28Google Scholar. Although “nationalism” (al-qawmiyya) and “Arabness” (al-ʿurūba) occasionally collapse into one another in this paper, I am unconvinced that they are synonymous in the Baʿthist lexicon, a problem I deal with at greater length elsewhere. All translations throughout are my own unless otherwise indicated.

⁵¹ Bashkin, Orit, “Hybrid Nationalisms: Wa ṭ anī and Qawmī Visions in Iraq under ʿAbd Al-Karim Qasim, 1958–1961,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 43/2 (2011), 293–312CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵² ʿAflaq, “Fi al-qawmiyya al-ʿarabiyya,” 26–7.

⁵³ Ibid., 27. What I have translated as “the organismic body” could also be rendered as “the living body” or “the vital body.” As I discuss below, the politics of translating ʿAflaq is intimately linked to political and philosophical interpretations of his thought.

⁵⁴ Cheah, Spectral Nationality, 59.

⁵⁵ ʿAflaq, “Fi al-qawmiyya al-ʿarabiyya,” 25. Please note that the Arabic word for “personality” or “personhood” (al-shakhṣiyya) is not the same word used for “personalism” (al-shakhṣāniyya).

⁵⁶ Ibid., 26.

⁵⁷ Ibid., 25.

⁵⁸ Ibid., 26.

⁵⁹ It would be possible to trace the connection further between Baʿthist thought and phenomenology, Heideggerian and otherwise, perhaps in a way that resonates with recent intellectual histories of phenomenology and politics. I have learned a great deal from Geroulanos, Stefanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (Stanford, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Gubser, Michael, The Far Reaches: Phenomenology, Ethics, and Social Renewal in Central Europe (Stanford, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁰ ʿAflaq, “Fi al-qawmiyya al-ʿarabiyya,” 28.

⁶¹ ʿAflaq, Michel, “Nationalism Is Love before Anything Else,” in Haim, Sylvia G., edf, Arab Nationalism: An Anthology (Berkeley, 1976), 242–9Google Scholar.

⁶² Michel ʿAflaq, “al-Qawmiyya ḥubb qabla kull shayʾ,” in ʿAflaq, Fi sabīl al-ba ʿ th, 29–30, at 29. These translations are my own.

⁶³ ʿAflaq, “Fi al-qawmiyya al-ʿarabiyya,” 28.

⁶⁴ Mounier, Emmanuel, Le personnalisme (Paris, 1957), 39Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ ʿAflaq, “al-Qawmiyya ḥubb qabla kull shay,” 29.

⁶⁶ Bengio, Ofra, Saddam's Word: Political Discourse in Iraq (New York, 1998), 20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁷ Bengio, Saddam's Word, 21.

⁶⁸ Lewis, Bernard, “Islamic Concepts of Revolution,” in Vatikiotis, P. J., ed., Revolution in the Middle East, and Other Case Studies (proceedings of a seminar) (London, 1972), 30–40Google Scholar, at 39–40. Lewis infamously cited a classical Arabic usage of the term thawrah as having “meant to rise up (e.g. of a camel), to be stirred or excited, and hence, especially in Maghribi usage, to rebel. It is often used in the context of establishing a petty, independent sovereignty … The noun thawra at first means excitement.” Ibid., 38. Said famously lampooned this translation in response to Lewis's critical review of his 1978 Orientalism. Edward Said, “Orientalism: An Exchange,” New York Review of Books, 12 Aug. 1982, at www.nybooks.com/articles/1982/08/12/orientalism-an-exchange.

⁶⁹ Batatu, The Old Social Classes, 739.

⁷⁰ Subsequent ʿAflaqists and other Baʿthists would invent a subsidiary concept, “al-inqilābiyya,” a state of “being in inqilāb” or “overturned-ness,” which I would translate, perhaps inelegantly, as “revolutionism.” The history of al-inqilābiyya awaits further research. See, for example, Bīṭār, Nadīm, al-Aydiyūlūjiya al-Inqilābiyya (The Inqilabi Ideology) (Beirut, 1964)Google Scholar.

⁷¹ Michel ʿAflaq, “Ḥizb al-inqilāb,” in ʿAflaq, Fi sabīl al-baʿth, 91–5, at 91–2.

⁷² Ibid., 92.

⁷³ Ibid., 92–3.

⁷⁴ Mounier, Emmanuel, “Programme pour 1933,” Esprit 1/3 (1932), 363–69Google Scholar, at 364, emphasis in the original.

⁷⁵ ʿAflaq, “Ḥizb al-inqilāb,” 93.

⁷⁶ Ibid., 94.

⁷⁷ Di-Capua, Yoav, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Decolonization (Chicago, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁸ In his analysis of socialism, ʿAflaq veers just as closely towards a social analysis. See, for example, ʿAflaq, Michel, Ḥawla al-ishtirākiyya al-ʿarabiyya (Damascus, 1954)Google Scholar.

⁷⁹ ʿAflaq, “Ḥizb al-inqilāb,” 95.

⁸⁰ al-Kawākibī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, al-Aʿmāl al-kāmilah li al-Kawākibī, ed. Taḥḥān, Muḥammad Jamāl (Beirut, 1995)Google Scholar.

⁸¹ Michel ʿAflaq, “Ḥawla al-inqilāb wa-l-qadr wa-l-ḥurriyya,” in ʿAflaq, Fi sabīl al-baʿth, 151–4, at 151.

⁸² Ibid., 152.

⁸³ Michel ʿAflaq, “Min maʿānī al-inqilāb,” in ʿAflaq, Fi sabīl al-baʿth, 145–50.

⁸⁴ Ibid., 145.

⁸⁵ Ibid. 146.

⁸⁶ Michel ʿAflaq, “al-Ṣila bayna al-ʿurūba wa-l-fikra al-inqilābiyya,” in ʿAflaq, Fī sabīl al-baʿth, 132–6, at 134–5.

⁸⁷ Ibid., 135.

⁸⁸ ʿAflaq, “Min maʿānī al-inqilāb,” 147.

⁸⁹ Ibid., 147.

⁹⁰ On ʿAflaq's vision of time and temporality see, for example, Michel ʿAflaq, “al-Zaman wa-l-ḥaraka al-inqilābiyya,” in Fī sabīl al-baʿth , 129–31.

⁹¹ Ibid., 129.

⁹² Michel ʿAflaq, “al-Tanẓīm al-inqilābī,” in ʿAflaq, Fi sabīl al-baʿth, 126–8, at 126.

⁹³ Ibid., 127.

⁹⁴ ʿAflaq, “al-Tanẓīm al-inqilābī,” 127.

⁹⁵ Michel ʿAflaq, “al-Baʿth al-ʿarabī huwa al-inqilāb,” in ʿAflaq, Fi sabīl al-baʿth, 101–5, at 101.

⁹⁶ Ibid., 101–2. “Al-Mughālabah” may signify the overcoming or transcendence of a given state of being, as in the usage above; the term may also refer to one force or person over-power-ing another or others and then immobilizing or vanquishing them.

⁹⁷ Ibid., 105.

⁹⁸ Ibid.

⁹⁹ Mounier, Le personnalisme, 35.

¹⁰⁰ Ibid., 36.

¹⁰¹ Hourani, Albert, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939 (London, 1962), 356Google Scholar.

¹⁰² Ibid., 357.

¹⁰³ On the contradictory legacies of Hourani in modern Arabic intellectual history see Hanssen, Jens and Weiss, Max, eds., Arabic Thought beyond the Liberal Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Nahda (Cambridge, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰⁴ Seale, Patrick, The Struggle for Syria: A Study of Post-war Arab Politics, 1945–1958 (New Haven, 1987; first published 1965), 30Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁵ This field continues to expand: Wien, Peter, Iraqi Arab Nationalism: Authoritarian, Totalitarian, and Pro-fascist Inclinations, 1932–1941 (London, 2006)Google Scholar; Litvak, Meir and Webman, Esther, From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust (New York, 2009)Google Scholar; Nordbruch, Götz, Nazism in Syria and Lebanon: The Ambivalence of the German Option, 1933–1945 (London, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust; Gershoni, Israel and Jankowski, James P.. Confronting Fascism in Egypt: Dictatorship versus Democracy in the 1930s (Stanford, 2010)Google Scholar; Gershoni, Israel, ed., Arab Responses to Fascism and Nazism: Attraction and Repulsion (Austin, TX, 2014)Google Scholar; Hanssen and Weiss, Arabic Thought beyond the Liberal Age; Hanssen and Weiss, Arabic Thought against the Authoritarian Age.

¹⁰⁶ Butler, Judith, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York, 1987)Google Scholar. See, too, Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought, esp. 111–25.

¹⁰⁷ Hellman, Emmanuel Mounier and the New Catholic Left, 9.

¹⁰⁸ Cheah, Spectral Nationalism, 6.

¹⁰⁹ Aron Lund, “The Miserable Afterlife of Michel Aflaq,” Syria in Crisis: Carnegie Middle East Center, 10 March 2014, at http://carnegie-mec.org/diwan/54844?lang=en.