The Egyptian Social Contract

Abstract

The Egyptian Social Contract explores the intricacies of the relationship between the state and its citizens, from the establishment of the semi-independent Egyptian nation in 1922 until the 2011 Uprising. The book foregrounds the social history of the social contract: the analysis of state–middle class relations and how these relations have shaped Egyptian society. It studies why and how a social contract that had been reformed in the aftermath of World War II became the core of state-citizen relations under President Nasser. Moreover, it looks at how this social contract channeled socioeconomic development over time, creating an Egyptian middle-class society. The book probes a political economy in which class vision and interests in development—state-supported mobility into the middle class and, later, the reproduction of this class—intertwined with the rise and entrenchment of authoritarianism in Egypt. Since the 1970s, the perseverance of this social contract has mostly inhibited the necessary socioeconomic and political reforms, or the making of a new social contract in Egypt, because such reforms would have challenged Egypt’s ruling elite, and no less so its ingrained, if increasingly struggling, middle-class society.