ABSTRACT
Abdallah Laroui represents a new generation of Arab historians who believed in their profession as a vocation and a prelude to political action. His intellectual preoccupations developed and matured after the Second World War. It was a period which witnessed the emergence of Arab independent states, the birth of political parties with clear ideological programmes, and the advent to power of radical army officers. Laroui welcomed and shared the various endeavours which sought to transform and regenerate the socioeconomic and cultural life of the Arabs in their individual states. Yet his writings combine and transcend the historical horizons of his generation and those of Ghurbal and Salibi. While he asks the same recurring questions about the national identity and the conditions which occasioned its genesis, the tone and substance of his answers are more pronounced and articulated. His works are openly ideological and deliberately flaunted as a statement of political commitment. He is consequently reluctant to engage his reader in an academic debate under false pretences; nor does he enshroud his real aims in pious prologues about objectivity, detachment, or selflessness.1 He stakes his reputation on offering a new interpretation of familiar facts and known data, culled and overworked by French and other western scholars.
