This paper analyzes and compares two political generations of Lebanese Shi‘i intellectual-activists, each of whom developed a shared consciousness and came together to mobilize as an active force for political change. Analyzing early party documents, along with speeches and writings of some of the central figures, I distinguish a generation that emerges with the Da‘wa party in Iraq in the late 1950s-1960s and a Hizbullah generation that emerges in the late 1970s-1980s. I examine the social and political conditions that contributed to each generation’s emergence and analyze the political thinking they came to articulate, with the aim of accounting for the differences and changes between generations. The first generation emerges from the hawza of Najaf and consists of figures who, along with the Iraqi intellectual Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, were involved in the formation of the first revolutionary Shi‘i Islamist party, Hizb al-Da‘wa al-Islamiyya. I focus my analysis on Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din, who headed Lebanon’s Higher Islamic Shi‘i Council after Musa al-Sadr’s disappearance, and Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, who was central in founding of Lebanon’s Da‘wa party and arguably the most important Shi'i intellectual until his recent death. Scholarship focusing on the early history of the Da‘wa has invariably focused on the attempt to curb the loss of Shi’i youth to communist and other secular parties. I demonstrate that what distinguishes this generation is not only their formulation of an alternative to secular ideologies, but the way in which their intellectual project was shaped by that challenge, as they translated some of the issues and rhetoric of these ideologies into Islamic categories. The second generation gains their political consciousness was formed amidst the Israeli invasions of Lebanon and the Islamic revolution in Iran. My analysis focuses chiefly on the past and present secretary generals of Hizbullah, Abbas al-Musawi and Hasan Nasrallah. Although both studied in Najaf, their time at the hawza was cut short by Iraqi government repression. Where the Da‘wa generation was concerned with the task of formulating a Shi‘i Islamist worldview, this generation displays a preference for direct action over intellectual work. I demonstrate that the difference between generations lies as much in the ways in the Hizbullah generation takes up and engages concerns and issues different than those of the Da‘wa generation as it does in any specific ways in which the former is influenced by or rejects the thought of the latter.