HISTORICISM, SOCIALISM AND LIBERALISM AFTER THE DEFEAT: ON THE POLITICAL THOUGHT OF YASIN AL-HAFIZ

Abstract

This essay deals with the intellectual transformation of the late Syrian intellectual Yasin al-Hafiz, and more precisely with his historicist blurring of the distinction between liberalism and socialism in the aftermath of the defeat of 1967. Even though this ideology was not a textbook liberalism, al-Hafiz's later rehabilitation of it is one of the many components of a genealogy of Arab liberalism, one that is marked by the end of the hopes of the postcolonial state. Through this reading of al-Hafiz's intellectual project, the essay addresses the broader question of travelling theories, and, more precisely, the question of how to study the modernist traditions in the non-Western world. In doing so, the goal is to set the basis for a rethinking of contemporary intellectual history in the Arab postcolonial era and to uncover its reflexive streak.