Fadi A. Bardawil. Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation.

Abstract

Enzo Traverso’s concept of “left-wing melancholy” neatly encapsulates the pervasive sentiment of mourning for the decisive defeat of the revolutionary and utopian dreams of the twentieth century among many leftist historians and critics. For leftist critics in the Middle East, this melancholic view of the twentieth century is largely centered on the eclipse of Marxist ideology and the Palestinian armed struggle by the dual forces of neoliberalism and Islamism. In his new study of the rise and fall of the Arab New Left in ­Lebanon, Fadi A. Bardawil promises to disrupt such melancholy and to rekindle a new “conversation around the possibilities and binds of emancipation” in the present moment by excavating and analyzing the “revolutionary exhilaration and political despair” of this Arab New Left generation (7). Bardawil’s historical anthropology uses a methodology that he calls “fieldwork in theory” to situate a corpus of critical theory translated and produced by the small coterie of militant Marxist intellectuals who formed Socialist Lebanon in the revolutionary commitments and disenchantments of the 1960s and 1970s. His thoughtful excavation of this forgotten archive of Arab Marxist theory, critical attention to social and political conditions, and nuanced analysis of the relationship between theory and practice produce a provocative argument about the pitfalls of ­adopting binary visions of power relations. By illuminating how these “binds of emancipation” blinded ­Socialist ­Lebanon to the complex relationships between revolutionary politics and social questions, Bardawil challenges the “historicist progressive logic” that pits Marxism against liberalism, secularism against ­Islamism, and Arabs against the West (193).