The recent revolutions and uprisings in the Middle East represent a rare historic opening for scholars, offering us nothing short of the opportunity to rethink the possibilities of history and our conceptions of “the political” itself. In so doing, we might be more open to the ways in which the empirical continually challenges us to rethink our conceptual models. Thus, while some immediately sought to categorize and co-opt the revolutions for their own purposes (Žižek's impassioned, albeit simplistic, “freedom is universal”), others listened closely to the voices on the ground in Tahrir and elsewhere. Now, if ever, is the time to critically reevaluate some of our theoretical models, our tenacious binaries (chiefly among them secularism versus Islamism) and our catch-all monolithic frameworks, such as “the military dictatorship,” “authoritarianism,” and even “neoliberalism.”

In particular, rethinking neoliberalism (or resistance to it) in terms of these revolutions will require a more nuanced attentiveness to historical specificity while avoiding the pretensions of universalizing and totalizing logics that seek a pro-forma explanation in terms of the primacy and purity of economic forces and center–periphery dynamics. Accounts that seek to understand the forces of change in terms of an “either/or” logic—liberalism or Islamism, revolution or counter-revolution—will need to be replaced by careful sociohistorical genealogies of governance, political subjectivity, and popular protest and mobilization. This will surely include a return to structural and class analysis, but any such understanding need no longer be grounded in orthodox conceptions of class as a universal subject of history. Rather, we may be better served by the conception of a multiform social, perhaps best conceived as an assemblage of complex forces and contradictions, in which class is ever present, albeit cross-hatched by other histories of struggle and alterity, subjectivity and solidarity.