Part One - From Social Reform to Social Justice, 1922–52

Summary

The following two chapters narrate the making and remaking of the Egyptian social contract between 1922 and 1952. Chapter one discusses how a liberal social contract inspired by global best practices, one that had gradually taken shape since the late nineteenth century, found its formal expression in the 1923 Egyptian constitution. Chapter two explains why, from the mid-1930s, and particularly between 1945 and 1952, a new, statist social contract emerged, again in close interaction with changing global conventional wisdom on politics and socio-economic policies of development. At the core of my analysis is a significant yet little-studied change in the Egyptian social contract: the move from an emphasis on social reform to an insistence on social justice. The expanding effendi middle class was both the main reason for and the main advocate of this change in a period of gradual decolonialisation.

Readers may wonder over the absence of a broader reference to politics in the analysis of a new social contract under the liberal monarchy. Indeed, while contemporary politics serves as an important context regarding the formulation and implementation of the social contract, Part One refrains from closely following both the familiar upheavals of Egyptian democratic life during this period and the constant rivalry and shifting alliances between the Wafd Party, the palace and the British. It also refrains from delving into the study of extra-parliamentary politics in Egypt. I intentionally put aside the study of immediate politics under the liberal monarchy for the sake of close engagement with a broader, infrastructural or paradigmatic transformation of what formulated the political itself. Hence, Part One foregrounds the debate over what an emerging Egyptian nation required, who should provide it, and how this should be accomplished.