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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 November 2014

SAMER FRANGIE
SAMER FRANGIE*
Affiliation:
Political Studies and Public Administration, American University of Beirut E-mail: [email protected]
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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.

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Articles
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , August 2015 , pp. 325 - 352
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

1 For more details on the intellectual transformations of the post-1967 era and the use of this date as a turning point see Abu-Rabi, Ibrahim M.’, Contemporary Arab Thought: Studies in Post-1967 Arab Intellectual History (London, 2003)Google Scholar; Ajami, Fouad, The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice Since 1967 (Cambridge, 1992)Google Scholar; Kassab, Elizabeth Suzanne, Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective (New York, 2009)Google Scholar; and Rejwan, Nissim, “The Shock of 1967”, in Rejwan, Arabs Face the Modern World: Religious, Cultural and Political Responses to the West (Gainesville, 1998)Google Scholar.

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5 A problem-space refers to a “discursive context, a context of language . . . a context of argument, and therefore, one of intervention. A problem-space, in other words, is an ensemble of questions and answers around which a horizon of identifiable stakes (conceptual as well as ideological–political stakes) hangs”. Scott, Conscripts of Modernity, 4.

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8 al-Hafiz, Yasin, Hawla Ba’d Qadaya ath-Thawra al-‘Arabiyya (Beirut, 2005), 104Google Scholar. All translations of al-Hafiz's quotes are mine. The page numbers correspond to his collected work published in 2005 by Markaz Dirasat al-Wihda al-‘Arabiyya.

9 These essays were written during or after the crisis in the Ba’th Party caused by the breakup of the union with Egypt. The Fifth National Conference, held in 1962, would call for the “eradication of the separatist disgrace”, labelling the coup of 1961 the “greatest reactionary conspiracy”.

10 The history of this theory, with its political implications in terms of alliances, is an important dimension of the history of Arab communist parties. For more details on this theory see Ismael, Tareq Y., The Communist Movement in the Arab World (Oxford, 2005)Google Scholar; Hosseinzadeh, Esmail, Soviet Non-capitalist Development: The Case of Nasser's Egypt (New York, 1989)Google Scholar; and Thomas, Clive Y., “‘The Non-capitalist Path’ as Theory and Practice of Decolonization and Socialist Transformation”, Latin American Perspectives, 5 (1978), 10–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Al-Hafiz, Hawla Ba’d Qadaya ath-Thawra al-‘Arabiyya, 161.

12 For more details see Ismael, Tareq Y., The Arab Left (Syracuse, 1976), 26–9Google Scholar.

13 It is unclear what role al-Hafiz exactly played in the production of this document, especially that the final version was edited in order to manage the various political constituencies present at the conference. But there is a consensus that he played a major role in the drive toward the rethinking of nationalism along socialist line that would be the hallmark of the final document. For more details, see Olson, The Ba’th and Syria, 18; Rabinovich, Syria under the Ba’th, 85; and Roberts, David, The Ba’th and the Creation of Modern Syria (London, 1987), 72Google Scholar.

14 Scott, Conscripts of Modernity.

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16 al-Hafiz, Yasin, al-La’aqlaniyya fi as-Siyassa al-‘Arabiyya (Beirut, 2005), 335Google Scholar

17 For more details on this turn, see Kassab, Contemporary Arab Thought.

18 For more details on the debates surrounding the Palestinian revolution in the early 1970s see Armanazi, Ghayth, “September Post-mortems”, Journal of Palestine Studies, 3 (1974), 130–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 al-Hafiz, Yasin, al-Hazima wa-l-Aydiwulujiyya al-Mahzuma (Beirut, 2005), 919Google Scholar.

20 Abdallah Laroui's name was associated with the deployment of historicism in Arab thought, and its promotion to the status of the master key for understanding Arab thought and societies. The concept of history, according to the Moroccan intellectual, despite being central to modern thought, is “peripheral to all the ideologies that have dominated the Arab world till now”. Based on this absence, Laroui will call upon Arab intellectuals “to espouse and propagandize an ‘historicist’ rationale”, being the only approach that “offers a rationale for collective action”. Laroui, Abdallah, The Crisis of Arab Intellectual: Traditionalism or Historicism? (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1976), x–xviiiGoogle Scholar.

21 Al-Hafiz, al-Tajriba al-Tarikhiyya al-Fiyetnamiyya: Taqyim Naqdi Muqaran ma’ al-Tajriba al-Tarikhiyya al-‘Arabiyya (Beirut, 2005), 537–8Google Scholar. Al-Hafiz quoted Marx from the preface to the first edition of Capital as a confirmation of the stagist definition he was after: “One nation can and should learn from others. Even when a society has begun to track down the natural laws of its movement, it can neither leap over the natural phases of its development nor remove them by decree. But it can shorten and lessen the birth-pangs”. Marx, Karl, Capital, vol. 1 (London, 1990), 92Google Scholar.

22 Al-Hafiz, al-Tajriba al-Tarikhiyya al-Fiyetnamiyya, 542.

23 Al-Hafiz, al-Hazima wa-l-Aydiwulujiyya al-Mahzuma, 885.

24 Ibid., 769.

25 Hamilton, Paul, Historicism (London, 2003), 3Google Scholar.

26 Al-Hafiz, al-Hazima wa-l-Aydiwulujiyya al-Mahzuma, 696.

27 Al-Hafiz, al-La’aqlaniyya fi as-Siyassa al-‘Arabiyya, 410.

28 In al-Ta’ifiyya wa ‘Azmat Lubnan al-Da’ima (Sectarianism and the Constant Crisis of Lebanon) (1973), in Al-Hafiz, al-'A'mal al-Kamila li-Yasin al-Hafiz (Beirut, 2005), 1081–9, he would lambast Marxist analysis of the Lebanese crisis as ideological, with the focus on the marginal class dimension masking the inability to deal with the much more central sectarian dimension of the problem.

29 Ibid., 348.

30 Hafiz, al-Tajriba al-Tarikhiyya al-Fiyetnamiyya, 531–2.

31 Iggers, Georg G., “Historicism: The History and Meaning of the Term”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 55/1 (Jan. 1995), 129–152, 133Google Scholar.

32 Bambach, Charles, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism (Ithaca, NY, 1995), 52, original emphasisGoogle Scholar.

33 Al-Hafiz diverges from Laroui's deployment of historicism, which aimed at reappropriating history as an ongoing transformation towards modernity. For al-Hafiz, by enclosing society as a whole in its backwardness, history cannot be reappropriated and transcended, but simply rejected and replaced by what seem to be more modern values. Laroui, on the other hand, was claiming that Arab intellectuals were rediscovering historicism, as a result of the intellectual and political transformation of the last fifty years: “Everyday experience militates in favour of historicism”. Laroui, The Crisis of Arab Intellectual, 129.

34 Historicism for Laroui is a call for action: “During the nineteenth century, historicism had lost a clearly defined meaning; it became synonymous with historical relativism, with evolutionism, with the theology of history, and even with nihilistic casuistry. But a clear understanding of what historicism had been and what, in given circumstances, it can always be—namely, the inner logic of political action—was forgotten, even when such a wide-ranging intellect as Gramsci's was concerned to reformulate it. Historiographers, epistemologists, formalists of all kinds and colors, obfuscated by the search for ‘stable structures,’ may well announce the poverty or tautology of historicism. They are not seeing it for what it really is: the practice of the modern Prince”. Ibid., 88–9.

35 For examples of such trespassing see Fadi A. Bardawil, When All This Revolution Melts into Air: The Disenchantment of Levantine Marxist Intellectuals (New York, 2010); Binder, Leonard, Islamic Liberalism: A Critique of Development Ideologies (Chicago, 1988)Google Scholar; Browers, Michaelle L., “Between Najaf and Jabal ‘Amil: A Portrait of Three Generations of Shi’i Intellectuals”, TAARII Newsletter (Spring 2009), 6–9Google Scholar; and Schumann, Christoph, “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 (2008), 404–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 For a review of some of these debates see Gershoni, Israel, “The Theory of Crisis and the Crisis in Theory: Intellectual History in Twentieth-Century Middle Eastern Studies”, in Gershoni, I., Singer, A. and Erdem, Y. Hakan, eds., Middle East Historiographies: Narrating the Twentieth Century (Seattle, 2006), 131–82Google Scholar.

37 Hourani, Albert, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939 (Cambridge, 1962)Google Scholar.

38 Schumann, “The ‘Failure’ of Radical Nationalism and the ‘Silence’ of Liberal Thought in the Arab World”, 405–6.

39 Ibid., 405.

40 Abu-Rabi’, Contemporary Arab Thought, 74.

41 Laroui, The Crisis of Arab Intellectual, 119.

42 Geuss, Raymond, Outside Ethics (Princeton, NJ, 2005), 11Google Scholar.

43 For a discussion on the relation between liberalism and empire see Mehta, Uday Singh, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago, 1999)Google Scholar; Muthu, Sankar, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton, NJ: 2003)Google Scholar; Parekh, Bhiku, “Liberalism and Colonialism: A Critique of Locke and Mill”, in Pieterse, N. and Parekh, B., eds., The Decolonization of Imagination (London, 1995), 81–98Google Scholar; Pitts, Jennifer, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sullivan, Eileen P., “Liberalism and Imperialism: J. S. Mill's Defense of the British Empire”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 44 (1983), 599–617CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 9.

45 Ibid., 30–31, original emphasis. For a discussion on the colonial dimension of historicism see Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ, 2000)Google Scholar.

46 For a related take on Egyptian modernist intellectuals see Meijer, Roel, The Quest for Modernity: Secular Liberal and Left-Wing Political Thought in Egypt, 1945–1958 (London, 2002)Google Scholar.

47 Al-Hafiz, Hawla Ba’d Qadaya ath-Thawra al-‘Arabiyya, 309.

48 Al-Hafiz, al-La’aqlaniyya fi as-Siyassa al-‘Arabiyya, 340.

49 Ibid., 448–9.

50 Ibid., 342.

51 Al-Hafiz, al-Tajriba al-Tarikhiyya al-Fiyetnamiyya, 592.

52 Ibid., 543.

53 Ibid., 543.

54 It is worth noting that starting with al-Tajriba al-Tarikhiyya al-Fiyetnamiyya, al-Hafiz started introducing some nuances between the bourgeois and the liberal, with the latter transcending the bourgeois dimension of Western societies, through reasserting what is “beyond and deeper than the bourgeois” in liberal thought. Ibid., 543.

55 Eid, Abd al-Razzaq, Yasin al-Hafiz: Naqd Hadathat al-Ta’akhur (Yasin al-Hafiz: The Critique of the Modernity of Backwardness) (Aleppo, 1996), 28Google Scholar.

56 Ibid., 40. Al-Hafiz would never treat the question of Arab liberals consistently, but would address it in scattered comments and footnotes, especially in his book al-Tajriba al-Tarikhiyya al-Fiyetnamiyya.

57 Al-Hafiz, al-Tajriba al-Tarikhiyya al-Fiyetnamiyya, 538.