This paper analyzes the political theoretical thrust of of the oeuvre of one of Egypt's most prominent philosophers, Hassan Hanafi (b. 1935). More specifically, it examines Hanafi's claim that the repeated faltering of the Egyptian -and Arab- Spring is their incompleteness: while it has managed to remove the political regime, the revolution has hitherto failed to transform the "consciousness" of the Egyptian subject, its disposition towards matters social and political. Such transformation, Hanafi adds, could only be brought about through a critical engagement and reinterpretation with the most central component of this consciousness: the popular and intellectual Arab-Islamic traditions. Accordingly, this paper investigates how Hanafi deploys the concept of “tradition” to perform two different and interrelated purposes: to critique that tradition's problematic impact on the constitution of modern-day Egyptian subjects, and to present a vision of these subjects if/when reformed in accordance with a “reconstructed tradition.” I then discern the theory of human agency underlying Hanafi’s dual conception of tradition, arguing that its failure to account for human interpretative activity across Arab-Islamic history puts in grave doubt the possibility that the contemporary Egyptian subject could indeed undergo the transformation that Hanafi intends it to: namely, become a critic and renewer of tradition rather than its passive heir.