Part Two - The Social Contract in Nasser’s Effendi State, 1952–70

Summary

From early on, and as already noticeable in Nasser's Philosophy of the Revolution (written during the second half of 1953 and first published in 1954), the revolutionaries consciously attempted to explain the 1952 revolution against the background of what they depicted as the failures of the Egyptian liberal monarchy. Past hardships were amplified, together with the ineptitude of Egypt's political leadership – particularly the king and the Wafd Party – in resolving them. This ineptitude of the ‘old regime’ explains why the army came out of the barracks to interfere in politics. Moreover, it illuminates why the initial military coup turned into a full-fledged revolution, and the Free Officers – now led by Nasser – were in place and ready to transform into the new regime. Soon enough, the same arguments would be used to wrench power from former sympathisers, notably the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian left. The revolutionary narrative carried a sense of a ‘zero hour’ – a new beginning and a seemingly decisive new scheme for bringing change to the pre-revolutionary past.

International analysis of the revolution often echoed this interpretation of the new political beginning and the making of an Egyptian social contract under Nasser. Scholars rightly discussed the political machinations that would eventually allow Nasser to establish his power. However, this did not mean, as is often suggested in such literature, that the Free Officers came into power with little realisation of what they were trying to achieve, often referred to in the historiography as the lack of a coherent ideology. Indeed, in such analyses there were often gaps between tracing Nasser and his generation's origins to the effendi middle class and tracing that generation's political formulation to the liberal monarchy, while suggesting that there was such ideological innocence. Since the late 1930s, and more plainly so in the aftermath of World War II, there had been a consensus in Egypt – which the Free Officers shared – regarding what was to be done: deliver social justice under an independent economy and state. Moreover, there was broad agreement as to how socio-economic development should be effected, and therefore, as to the need for a greater state role in the process, an involvement increasingly associated with ‘socialism’.