This paper offers a reading of Butrus Al-Bustānī’s “Khiṭab fī al-hayʾa al-ijtimāʿiyya" (1869), in order to offer a reflection on the social logic that undergirds it, and which it simultaneously invents and advances, which it propels, outwardly, at the world. This paper focus on four interlocking terms in al-Bustānī's text--"social body," "al-hayʾa al-ijtimāʿiyya"; "abstraction," al-tajrīd"; "the individual," "al-fard"; and "simplicity," "al-basāta"--in order to address the ways in which this text re-articulates and reorganizes a sense of relation and of being. What is advanced, in al-Bustānī, is, all at once, a reflection on language (language is to be simple, and it is to be a means for communication); on relation (beings, in sociality, are to be "individuals," which relate to each other in the controlled and regulated form of a "social body"); and on judgment ("individuals" are to be judging beings, who abstract from their learned social and historical forms, from "dhawq," taste, and "'āda," "custom," in order to make a determination in relation to an object). And all of this is to occur in relation to an outward press, at the "illiterate," "al-umiyyīn," and the "common people," "'umūm al-ahali," who are, now, conscripted to become abstract judging subjects--subjects for a social logic of abstraction. If, in the dictionary of al-Fīrūzābādī, the "group" is likened to a pomegranate, in al-Bustānī the field of beings is to be understood as a "social body," a combination and articulation of multiplicity which draws into a new, proper, and stabilizing order the unruly and unsanctioned motion of "the masses," "al-jumhur." If this text forms concepts, then, it does so as it sends them at the world and the beings it sustains; and if, as it does so, al-Bustānī's text translates--because it coerces a rendering of the world in a particular way, altering the sense of words as it does so--we may also notice that it stalls and indetermines the categories it privileges, and, therefore, that this text gives us to understand the world differently, and anew.