Abdallah Laroui :the life and politics of a messenger

Abstract

This thesis avoids the two prevalent approaches to the study of Arab conteporay intellectual history, those either focusing on the history of mere ideas or on the history of individuals , through the historical investigation of the thought of Abdallah Laroui and the use of his theoretical notions into a different context, namely that of Yāsīn al-Hāfiẓ. In the introduction we argue that a proper understanding of the Arab intellectual industry has to pass through a political typology of this intellectual industry. We undertake such a methodological approach with respect to the work of Moroccan intellectual Abdallah Laroui, one of the main cornerstones of contemporary Arab political thought. After showing that there existed no causal or intellectual relationship between the 1967 ‘Defeat’ of Arab armies and Laroui’s first theoretical work in L’idéologie arabe contemporaine(1967), The first chapter provides a biographical relocation of Laroui, within his Moroccan political context, in order to counter the hegemonic tendency to read him as a detached intellectual addressing in abstract terms the Arab world. This is followed by an investigation of two of his main works, L’idéologie arabe contemporaine and The Crisis of Arab Intellectuals: Traditionalism or Historicism? in order to show the interplay between changing theoretical influences and the political context he was responding to, with the evolution of Laroui within the Moroccan political spectrum from being a nationalist Moroccan Leftist into the Right aligning himself with the ruling Moroccan Monarchy. We try to understand through an analysis of the theoretical education he acquired in Paris first, then with other influences he was exposed to while teaching at UCLA, how successive political positioning influenced his theoretical shifts and we show that important theoretical differences that related to such an evolution exist between his first theoretical exposition in L’idéologie arabe