Jonathan Viger

This article seeks to reinterpret the process of state and class formation in “peripheral” societies—notably Syria—through a contextualized reading of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire influenced by the approach of Political Marxism (PM). In light of PM’s claim that capitalism did not emerge in France until the late nineteenth century, it draws a picture of post-revolutionary French society in which the legacy of the precapitalist Absolutist state still determined the nature of ruling class reproduction and class struggle, centered on the state apparatus as the principal source of appropriation. These insights on the nature of ruling class appropriation and the centrality of the state are then applied to the case of post-Ottoman Syria, uncovering parallels with class struggles in post-revolutionary France rooted in the “Jacobin” politics of a state-dependent bourgeoisie of officials and officers. It proposes to rethink the contested moments of transition in terms of “alternative modernities” that developed in the absence of generalized capitalist relations of production.

This article reconsiders the split that exists between the discipline of international relations and intellectual history in the light of comparative and connected global history, international relations and the “travel” of ideas in translation studies. By looking more closely at the uneven and combined development approach, it seeks to identify the mechanisms that make the international context a particular field of causality in the analysis of political thought. How are geopolitical interactions between various societies perceived by the social actors who experience them? How does this perception affect their personal identification and the definition of their community and account for the importation, appropriation and redefinition of foreign political ideas as well as the production of new meanings. This framework of analysis is developed by studying the political thought of the Egyptian intellectual Rifâ‘a Al-Tahtâwî (1801-1873). The central argument of the article is that the thought of Tahtâwî represents an attempt to construct a project of an other modernity formulated in terms of the geopolitical context of the time, which was marked by the consequences of the Napoleonic invasion, the decline of the position of Ottoman Egypt in the international hierarchy and the rise to power of Muhammad ‘Ali. Cette analyse revient sur la fracture existant entre la discipline des relations internationales et l’histoire intellectuelle à la lumière, tout d’abord, de l’histoire globale, croisée et connectée ; ensuite, des relations internationales ; enfin, de la traductologie et du « voyage » des idées. L’objectif est d’identifier, par le biais d’un approfondissement de l’approche du développement inégal et combiné, les mécanismes constituant le contexte international comme un champ particulier de causalité dans l’analyse de la pensée politique. Comment les interactions géopolitiques entre différentes sociétés sont-elles perçues par les acteurs sociaux qui en font l’expérience ? Comment cette perception affecte-t-elle leur identification personnelle et la définition de leur communauté, et motive l’importation, l’appropriation et la redéfinition d’idées politiques étrangères ainsi que la production de nouvelles significations. Ce cadre d’analyse est développé via l’étude de la pensée politique de l’intellectuel égyptien Rifâ‘a Al-Tahtâwî (1801- 1873). L’argument central est que la pensée de Tahtâwî représente une tentative de construction d’un projet de modernité autre formulé à travers un engagement dans le contexte géopolitique de l’époque, marqué par les conséquences de l’invasion napoléonienne, le déclin de la position de l’Égypte ottomane dans la hiérarchie internationale et l’accession au pouvoir de Muhammad ‘Ali.

InthewakeofthepresentcrisisintheMiddleEast,thispaperproposestolocatethe processes of state formation and nation building within a larger historical context, recovering the historicity of the crisis. It records the rise and fall of a nationalist developmental project in Syria through an analysis of class relations. It highlights an essential continuity in the nature of class reproduction from the late Ottoman to the early independence period, centered on the conservative nationalism of the mercantile ruling bloc. It associates the rise of a national developmental project with the politicization of the Bmiddle classes,^ which occupied a central role in the state apparatus. This class represented the main driving force behind the expansion of the boundaries of political power and the process of nation building. It is the class polarization of society that fuelled the development of a nation-building project and favored the creation of a national populist alliance against the monopoly of traditional ruling classes. However, this alliance was short-lived, and the process of authoritarian demobilization that followed led to the resurgence of personal networks and the end of nation building.