Born into a middle-class Alawite family in Latakia, Syria, al-Arsuzi studied at the Sorbonne, where he became interested in nationalism.

In Damascus al-Arsuzi established and headed a group consisting of mostly secondary school pupils who would often discuss European history, nationalism and philosophy.

It was not a success and, on his return to Syria in November 1940 after a brief stay in Baghdad, al-Arsuzi established a new party, the Arab Ba'ath; by 1944, however, most of its members had left and joined Michel Aflaq's and Salah al-Din al-Bitar's Arab Ba'ath Movement, which subscribed to a nearly identical doctrine.

He made a comeback during the 1960s power struggle in the Ba'ath Party between Aflaq and al-Bitar on one hand and Salah Jadid and Hafez al-Assad on the other.

This omission may be linked to the fact that Sati' al-Husri, a contemporary Arab nationalist, had many of the same ideas as al-Arsuzi but was better able to articulate them.

Zaki Najib Ibrahim al-Arsuzi was born in 1900 or 1901 to a middle-class family[1] of Alawi origins in Latakia on the Syrian coast of the Ottoman Sultanate.

[3] His father was imprisoned for a short period before he and his family were sent to internal exile in the Anatolian city of Konya.

[5] In August 1933, al-Arsuzi and fifty other Arab nationalists established the League of National Action (LNA) in the Lebanese city of Quarna'il.

[6] In 1939 France, which controlled Syria, ceded the province to Turkey in order to establish an alliance with that state.

At the group's meetings, al-Arsuzi would talk about, for instance, the French Revolution, the Meiji Restoration, German Unification and Italian Unification, or about the ideas of Fichte, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Oswald Spengler and Henri Bergson.

[9] During his stay in Baghdad, al-Arsuzi tried, idealistically, to enlighten Iraqis with his thoughts on Arab nationalism, but returned to Syria disappointed in 1940.

[15] According to one of his associates, al-Arsuzi himself spent a great deal of time living in "extreme poverty", reduced "to a life of penury and persecution" by the French authorities.

While several Arab Ba'ath members agreed with al-Arsuzi's conclusion, the majority were attracted to Aflaq's romanticism.

[25] Al-Arsuzi paid considerable attention to cultural matters, and Batatu records that the only condition of membership in his organisation was "to write or translate a book contributing to the resurrection [ba'ath] of Arab heritage.

His approach was distinguished by its emphasis on philology, but he did also pay attention to problems of the modern state and to questions of democracy and the locus of power.

[27] Batatu has also described al-Arsuzi as having a racist outlook, which proved in the end intellectually sterile and unsatisfactory to his followers, and as having been deeply influenced in his thought by the tenets of his Alawi religious background.

[26] Al-Arsuzi argued that unlike the Latin language, which is conventional and uses arbitrary signs to explain certain objects, the Arabic language formed words derived from the vocalism of its syllables and "in its expression of a direct representation of a natural object" – unlike Latin, Arabic is essentially in conformity with nature.

[29] Al-Arsuzi attributed the rise of European nationalism to revolutions in intellectual, social and economic domains.

The first revolution came to being under the feudal system, which gave birth to human casual[clarification needed] and relative relationships.

Al-Arsuzi summed up this particular view of human behaviour and civilization with René Descartes's words: "Common sense or reason is naturally equal to man".

[30] In al-Arsuzi's view, if humans were rational creatures, each would wish to organise themselves according to his or her own sense of reason, and hence would want to take over the affairs of state from oppressors (colonists).

Science eliminated superstition, and replaced it with facts; and Industry enabled civilization to create a more strong, organised society where liberty, equality and democracy could become permanent.

[32] Al-Arsuzi's work and thought are almost unknown and barely mentioned in Western scholarship on Arab nationalism.

Academic Yasir Suleiman gives the principal reason for this as the similarity of al-Arsuzi's works to those of Sati' al-Husri, a contemporary.

Thirdly, and in contrast to al-Husri's work, al-Arsuzi's work seemed old-fashioned, due to his use of old words and historical texts; moreover, while al-Arsuzi wrote about the symbolic need of an Arab Nation, al-Hustri wrote about the practical role of an Arab Nation—al-Arsuzi was obscure where al-Husri was transparent.

[34] Another reason for his "negligible" impact, according to Suleiman, was al-Arsuzi's idea of the need to replace the traditional Arabic grammar system with a new one.

[35] The Center for Research and Documentation on World Language Problems agrees with Suleiman's conclusion, but further claims that al-Arsuzi's work was "often far-fetched and 'airy-fairy'".

[37] Al-Assad has referred to al-Arsuzi as the "greatest Syrian of his day" and claimed him to be the "first to conceive of the Ba'ath as a political movement.

[39] Despite this, Keith David Watenpaugh believes Ba'athism was conceived by the "trio" consisting of al-Arsuzi, Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar, and not one principal founder.