Who Counts as a Theorist? Locating Maghrebi Sociologists in the Intellectual History of Decolonization

At the beginning of the 1980s, a central question in debates among social scientists throughout the Arab region was the relationship of intellectuals to the state. These debates were inseparable from Arab sociologists’ intense re-evaluation of their own paradoxical position as both products and critics of the postcolonial state and its modernization projects. In this process, Arab sociologists raised conceptual and methodological questions regarding the universality or particularity of sociological theory—and of the sociologists themselves. In this article, I explore how sociologists from the Maghreb, especially Algeria and Tunisia, critiqued the “developmentalist” policies of post-independence governments and attempted to re-evaluate existing theories and methods that they saw as adopted from “Western” social science. I argue that the writings on the “formation of intellectuals” initially formulated by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) proved especially useful to reflect the role of intellectuals and their position toward the state. As I will demonstrate, an intellectual history of social thought in the Maghreb in the 1980s raises questions of central importance to the intellectual history of freedom and decolonization.