In 1950 `Abd al-Rahman Badawi, who was known at the time as “the first modern Arab philosopher”, announced that he had devised a new philosophy for “our generation.” Khalid Muhammad Khalid wrote Min huna nabda (From Here we Begin), a scathing attack on the clergy and a call for religious reform. Suhayl Idris, a young Beiruti intellectual, left for Paris and returned in 1953 as a devoted existentialist. He founded the powerful literary magazine al-Adab and contributed greatly to the transformation of Beirut into the capital of Arab thought. Literary critic Mahmud Amin al-`Alim and mathematician Abd al-`Aziz Anis published Fi’l-thaqafa al-misriyya (On Egyptian Culture), accusing the Arab intellectual establishment of exemplifying a detached, “ivory tower” attitude. They believed in the so-called “Arab masses” and ushered in a Marxist-inspired aesthetics of social realism. Iraqi poet Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayyati committed himself to an exploration of the Arab human condition in the wake of colonialism. Inspired by Albert Camus, he believed in self-liberation and “rebellion against reality.” These were some of the best minds of Arab thought during the era of de-colonization. They were secular cultural optimists, members of the “proud generation” who sought to re-invent a new Arab subject: proud, modern, independent, self-sufficient, and, above all, free. By the 1967 this generation was defeated as many of its members experienced intellectual life as a process that involved alienation, suppression, statelessness, besiegement, material poverty and disillusionment with the political process. But what were the causes and precise mechanisms underlying the rise and fall of this promising group? Were their designs for a new era superficial? Was their secular cultural vision inapplicable to an essentially religious society? Where they, as some suggested, suppressed by new forms of Western domination? In as much as these questions are being asked at all, the mainstream responses of scholars like Fuad Ajami, Adeed Dawisha, Hisham Sharabi and many others, is that the war defeated the unitary political aspirations of Pan-Arab nationalism and thus left the so-called “Arab masses” without an ideology and hence a future. This explanation is in need of revision. As part of a book project and based on hitherto unstudied Arabic source material, I wish to explore in depth the collective biography of this generation by way of writing an intellectual history of 1967.