The recent calls for change sweeping across parts of the Arab world, triggered by the events in Tunisia, have stimulated interest as to the causation of this phenomenon. In this context, it is worth looking back to the creation of state cultural hegemony in North Africa which pushed key alternative voices out of the public dialogue such as those of Malek Bennabi and Mohammad Hasan Wazzani. Both of these figures were prominent intellectual participants in the Maghrebi nationalist movements. Yet they both suffered more from government restrictions and censorship after independence than they did during the struggle against colonialism. Muhammad Hassan Wazzani founded one of Morocco’s first independence parties al-Shura al–Istiqlal and was a massive proponent of free press, but particularly suffered under Allal al-Fassi’s government. The Algerian thinker Malek Bennabi promoted continual dialogue and self-criticism within the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic in order to create an invigorated and thereby effective state. For social and political reasons, Bennabi found that his intellectual post-modernist critique made him unpopular and ultimately undesirable in Algeria's public domain. Both these individuals were participants in the struggle for independence, and yet ended up to a certain extent on the fringes of Maghrebi nationalism. As well as bringing more attention to these intellectual figures within English language historiography, this paper intends to compare the life and works of these two Maghrebi contemporaries in order to illustrate some of the intellectual undercurrents in early North African nationalism and to discuss some of the problems associated with state formation and cultural hegemony. Both these figures pertained to the more intellectual strands of Maghrebi nationalism, having been involved in the Association of North-African Muslim Students in France and contributed to the nationalist press. This comparative approach can help identify how significant these intellectual contributions were to the processes of nation-building at a micro level while questioning the nature of Magrebi nationalism at a macro level. The study will discuss the problems of defining nationalist movements, the significance of Islamic intellectual currents on Maghrebi nationalism and the degree to which governments are responsible for the diminished impact of these intellectuals on their local cultural spheres. Although it is necessary to ascertain Morocco and Algeria’s different political and intellectual environments, many of these issues are pertinent to the wider history of state formation and the role of Islamic thought in Arab nationalism.