Fadi Bardawil
LSE Middle East Centre Paper Series | 16 | October 2016
Abstract
In the wake of the Arab popular uprisings, this short piece revisits the thought of an earlier generation of revolutionaries. Unlike those today, who are united by the desire to overthrow authoritarian regimes but who come from competing ideological universes and conceptions of the political, this earlier generation of militants grounded political practice in a thick Marxist theoretical language. This paper focuses on the writings of Waddah Charara as well as the Marxist tradition of thought at the beginning of the Lebanese civil and regional wars (1975–1990). It highlights how Charara’s analysis rethought the question of power away from class politics in the wake of his diagnosis of the failure of hegemony in Lebanon.
About the Author
Dr Fadi Bardawil is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Global Studies in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of North Carolina. Prior to this, he spent three years as Harper Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Society of Fellows. Fadi's work looks into the lives and works of contemporary modernist Arab thinkers in the context of the international circulation of social theory. Currently, he is completing In Marxism’s Wake: The Disenchantment of Levantine Intellectuals, a book that examines the ebbing away of Marxist thought and practice through focusing on the intellectual and political trajectories of a generation – born around 1940 – of previously militant, public intellectuals.