How do anticolonial Arab intellectuals inhabit postcolonial time, a time when, to borrow David Scott’s words, “anticolonial utopias have gradually withered into postcolonial nightmares” (2004, 2)? How do these thinkers try to carve a political vision at a moment when grand theoretical narratives have failed to account for and/or transform social and political reality, but when their end goals (for self-government, political equality, social justice, economic sufficiency, etc.) still define the horizon of political aspiration? Stated somewhat differently, how do these thinkers bridge their mounting sense of doubt about the universal applicability of revolutionary theories, with their continued certainty about the modernist ends advocated by these theories? This paper explores how a prominent contemporary Arab thinker, Abdullah Laroui (b. 1933), inhabits and thinks through this intellectual-historical moment. Through examining his writings in the 1980s and the 1990s, and contrasting them with his earlier revolutionary writings from the 1960s and 1970s, it suggests that Laroui’s strategy for tackling this post-decolonial moment is to embark on a pedagogical mission. If the Laroui of the late 1960s addressed himself to the revolutionary intellectual and leader and theorized about the unique character of revolutionary thought in Arab societies, the Laroui of the 1980s and 1990s directs his speech at a more general Arab readership, and seeks to transform the foundations of its understanding of the Arab political condition since the colonial period. Contra an early Laroui who uses theoretical shorthand, the late Laroui launches a slow, definitional, historically-informed analysis of what he takes to be the central concepts underlying the being and functioning of modern society such as freedom, the state, ideology, reason and history. He then rhetorically performs the rupture such concepts promulgate with their premodern counterparts, most especially concepts associated with the Islamic tradition. In doing so, I suggest, Laroui tries to produce an “Arab self” that is critically proud of its cultural heritage, but fully aware of that heritage’s epistemological distinction from modern understandings of the natural and social worlds. Like the revolutionary Laroui of the 1960s and 1970s, the point of this exercise is to persuade the Arab reader that only a critical awareness of that distinction, and an equally critical adaptation of these modern concepts, could guide successful political practice in a world where modern Euro-American ideas and polities still hold sway.