Antoun Saadeh (Arabic: أنطون سعادة, romanized: ʾAnṭūn Saʿādah; 1 March 1904 – 8 July 1949) was a Lebanese politician, sociologist, philosopher and writer who founded the Syrian Social Nationalist Party.

He was the son of a Syrian Greek Orthodox Christian physician,[1] Khalil Saadeh[2] and Naifa Nassir Khneisser.

[3] His father was himself a Syrian nationalist as well as democracy advocate, and also an intellectual and author, who has been described as "a prolific writer and polymath, whose works span the fields of politics, literature, journalism, novel-writing, and translation".

[4] Antoun Saadeh completed his elementary education in his birth town and continued his studies at the Lycée des Frères in Cairo and came back to Lebanon at the death of his mother.

[5] In the later part of 1919, Saadeh immigrated to the United States, where he resided for approximately one year with his uncle in Springer, New Mexico and worked at a local train station.

During the time he spent in prison, he wrote his third book, "The Rise of the Syrian Nation", but his manuscript was confiscated, and the authorities refused to return it to him.

He founded Al-Zawba'a (The Storm) newspaper and wrote The Intellectual Conflict in Syrian Literature, which was printed in Buenos Aires.

After his return, he made a revolutionary speech, upon which the authorities issued an arrest warrant in force for seven months and withdrew.

The revolt was suppressed and Saadeh travelled to Damascus to meet with Husni al-Za'im, the President of Syria at the time, who had previously agreed to support him.

[8] The SSNP "Zawbaa" (Vortex, Tempest) is a glyph combining the Muslim crescent and the Christian cross, derived from Mesopotamian art.

It symbolizes the blood shed by martyrs that makes the wheel of history whirl forward, dissipating the surrounding darkness (representing sectarianism, Ottoman occupation, and the colonial oppression that followed).

Saadeh rejected Pan-Arabism (the idea that the speakers of the Arabic language form a single, unified nation) and argued instead for the creation of the state of United Syrian Nation or Natural Syria, encompassing the Fertile Crescent, making up a Syrian homeland that "extends from the Taurus range in the northwest and the Zagros mountains in the northeast to the Suez Canal and the Red Sea in the south and includes the Sinai Peninsula and the Gulf of Aqaba, and from the Syrian Sea in the west (namely the eastern basin of the Mediterranean facing the Levant coastlines), including the island of Cyprus, to the arch of the Arabian Desert and the Persian Gulf in the east."

He argued that Syria was historically, culturally, and geographically distinct from the rest of the Arab world, which he divided into four parts.

For him, the man was a totality by himself as much as in connection with his immediate surrounding, a social being but with his own dignity, which brings him closer to the personalism of someone like Nikolai Berdyaev.

In his vision, the society's main role was to shape the individual being-as-relation through the Khaldunian notion of assabiya (solidarity), which, through some common features (geography, language, culture, ...) brings out the best in him, but without oppressing his liberties nor negligible either the spiritual or the material aspect, like he witnessed in contemporary ideologies such as communism, fascism or Nazism.

"[15] He had a regionalist vision of nationalism because he gave some utmost importance to geography: even if he was not an utmost environmental determinist, he thought that a man's relation with his milieu involves a particular way of acting because of the different climate, fauna or flora; men will manage their resources differently whether they're in mountains or desert, which will also have consequences on their interactions with foreign groups (over the control of the same resources and so on).

On racialism – which was associated with nationalism in many European ideologies -, "he argued that, contrary to common belief, race is a purely physical concept that has nothing to do with the psychological or social differences between human communities.