A decade before Che Guevara published his captivating call for the forging of a so-called “New Man, (“Socialism and Man in Cuba”, 1965), Arab intellectuals were already busy theorizing the very same persona. Postcolonial societies all over the world were thirsty for a clean break with colonialism and a new beginning which will be both modern and authentic, entirely new as well as respectfully old. While the idea of reinventing the human subject can be traced back to Enlightenment (and even before that), and have a long modern pedigree with Communism and other revolutionary societies, Arab intellectuals were not simply copying someone else’s agenda. To the contrary, they were attentive to the specific condition of the Arab world and envisioned something much wider than a state-lead pedagogical effort as in the Soviet Union. Specifically, similar to early Ba`thi theorists and at times inspired by them, they vied for a full ontological transformation that would forever alter the Arab nature of being. While this project was to be carried on a mass scale, the essence of change was to nest in each and every individual. Bearing an entirely new consciousness, this type of new human being will be selfless, resolute, free, rational, independent and would have the capacity for sacrifice on behalf of the common good of the masses. In other words, he will be a revolutionary man who will symbolize the re-birth of the sovereign Arab nation as a whole and the resurrection of its masses. Alas, this idealist project was not without problems. What about the “New Woman”? Was the “New Man” automatically assumed to be a masculine heterosexual male and if so what were the possible consequences of a revolutionary project that is modeled only on men? How could this new human subject be simultaneously both old and new? Was he assumed to be secular and yet carry the legacy of Islam? How was his authenticity theorized? Of equal importance given the revolutionary tasks ahead and the call for sacrifice, how was his relation to violence theorized? Based on a forgotten body of work from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s, this paper revisits the remarkable ontological effort to create a new revolutionary subject; a project that affords us a more intimate understanding of revolutionary Arab societies than the common investigation of “big ideologies” such as Pan Arabism.