This early book belongs to a moment when Lebanon’s crisis was being fought with ideas as well as with weapons, and it ties the “national” to the “democratic” instead of separating them. Fawwaz Traboulsi reads Lebanon through class structure, oligarchic domination, and the political use of sectarianism, refusing to reduce the crisis to a constitutional flaw or a misunderstanding between communities. Its importance lies in being an early intervention that thinks Lebanon as a problem of social and political transformation rather than of endlessly repairing a regime of privilege.