Until recently, historians of the Middle East have largely read the work of late Ottoman writers through the prism of identity looking for the stirrings of nationalist and religious sentiment that would emerge in the twentieth century. This scholarly activity has been cotemporaneous if not coextensive with the task of tracing the diffusion of Western concepts and their influence on the historical trajectory of different communities in the region. Intrinsic to both the endogamous and diffusionist models is a reified notion of ideas emanating from the West and of traditions grounded elsewhere, as things transmitted, traded and passed along through space and through time, respectively. Even in disagreement, the models contribute to a stark binary scheme for sifting the authentic from the foreign, secular from the religious, Muslim from Christian, and the universal from the particular. While these binaries are not entirely absent from the work of late Ottoman writers, they served as signposts for making sense of and navigating the changing social landscape of the period rather than the precocious denotation of the closed-off, balkanized identities that intellectual history made them to be over the preceding century. This paper explores ?Abd al-Ra?m?n al-Kaw?kib?’s attempts to construct a critical science of politics at the beginning of the twentieth century. A native of Ottoman Aleppo, al-Kaw?kib? emigrated to Cairo in the late 1890s. al-Kaw?kib? would spend the next few years traveling beyond the Eastern Mediterranean heart of the Ottoman Empire reaching as far as Karachi in British India and Harar in Ethiopia. The essays he published during the period—later collected under the title The Characteristics of Despotism—have often been read, despite his own explicit statements, as translations of Western political theories about tyranny and democracy thinly masking a critique of the Hamidian regime. While some of the vocabulary derived from European political philosophy, al-Kaw?kib?’s essays tried to convey the social reality of the places he visited into a generalizable theory of politics in what he termed “Eastern societies.” To accomplish this, he turned to the Arab press for a mode of political thinking amenable to the empirical reality of these societies. It was the nascent field of journalism, he argued, that embodied political thought in the Arab world. The paper explores al-Kaw?kib?’s project and how the material practices of translation and adaptation germane to the work of Arab newspapers guided his attempts to construct a critical science of politics.