Abdelhadi Ghailan – Cultural History and Nation-building in Contemporary Arab Thought: A Critical Study of the Intellectual Projects of Abdellah Laroui and Taha Abderrahmane
Viva Date: July 18th, 2025
Abstract:
This thesis explores the intellectual projects of Abdallah Laroui and Taha Abderrahmane within the framework of an ongoing debate among thinkers on cultural history and nation-building in the Arab world. It is a comparative study of the ‘historicism’ of Abdallah Laroui and Taha Abderrahmane’s ‘deliberative field’ and ‘trusteeship’ paradigm. The research project is informed by the argumentative structures of the oeuvres of Laroui and Abderrahmane, as well as by their disagreements on a multiplicity of philosophical, socio-political, and cultural issues. The motive behind this choice is that it emerged from the Arab nation-state and nation-building failures, which brought the overwhelming part of contemporary Arab thought to light. This project analyses disparities and discrepancies in the discourse on the positioning of Laroui and Abderrahmane as models of Arab thought. The thesis argues that Laroui and Abderrahmane share the same socio-cultural backgrounds regarding the Arab nation-state and nation-building failures, and that their intellectual projects are essentially engaged in deeply discursive scripts with trenchant ideological and political premises and socio-cultural aspirations difficult to comprehend without reference to those failures.
