Linda Darling suggests that social justice in the Ottoman Empire emanated from an earlier ‘circle of justice’, a paradigm that dominated earlier political thinking, taking its final shape in the sixteenth century. According to the circle of justice, a ruler having a divine blessing or appointment had the duty to protect the state from enemies both external and internal, for which he required a military force. To maintain that force, the ruler had to tax economic activity. To ensure high taxation, the ruler needed to secure basic economic infrastructure such as irrigation for agriculture, roads and markets, as well as to ensure legal justice, including protecting producers (peasants) from the elites. Islamic thinkers objected to the exaltation of the ruler but, nevertheless, accepted the circle of justice. According to this concept, if any part of the system malfunctioned, it threatened the entire system, and it therefore required close cooperation between ruler and ruled to maintain its equilibrium.

According to Darling, ‘the new concepts of nationhood and citizenship did not replace, but were added to, older concepts of interdependency and justice between rulers and people’. She further argues that while the use of the circle of justice disappeared from political discourse in the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire, some aspect of this concept remained embodied in modern Middle Eastern politics, namely ‘the expectation that the state is responsible to provide the means of protection, prosperity, and social justice or to compensate for their lack’. Darling continues: ‘In the modern monarchies and republics that developed after World War I, condemnations of violations by indigenous elites or foreign rulers and demands for just rule from national governments echoed the Circle's definition of justice’. While the circle of justice might have had an implicit impact on a later notion of social justice, Darling's analysis does not account for social and economic changes and their impact on the de facto content of the latter term. Beyond the overall responsibility of rulers, the exact meaning of social justice in a fast-changing economy and society in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East is quite vague.

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.

From early on, the Free Officers emphasised that the revolution was a social as well as an economic and political revolution that aimed to create a ‘new society’. According to this narrative, the 1952 revolution was a social revolution in the sense that it would bring social justice – equity and equality of opportunity for all Egyptians. Following the formal transition to socialism during the early 1960s, this revolution was also supposed to change the structural base of society by creating a classless society. In such a utopian society, social solidarity would allow social cooperation that would mend previous social problems. This chapter asks the following questions: To what extent did social engineering – the state role in socio-economic development through the formal expansion of the social contract – bring social change to Egypt, and what kind of change? Put differently, what transitions did the promised ‘fruits of the revolution’ bring to Egyptian society, and to which classes within society? And how did the new society differ from the old?

To respond to these questions, this chapter evaluates social change along three class lines: peasants and workers, or lower-class Egyptians; the middle class; and upper-class Egyptians. It investigates pre- and post-revolutionary transitions among these social classes, throughout the period 1952–70. The chapter first evaluates the notion of a new Nasserite elite and argues that this new elite embraced much of the earlier effendi vision of good government and governance. It then investigates how hierarchies of state redistribution schemes – the state's universal as opposed to progressive social policies and economic development schemes – benefited each social group. Central to the analysis here is an examination of the development of ‘middle society’ following the revolution. This middle society included the lower and middle echelons of urban, educated and often state-employed Egyptians. It also included organised labour, now incorporated into the newly emerging public sector, and middle-size landowners/peasants. The chapter discusses how, rather than helping the peasants and workers most in need, or creating a classless society, the effendi social contract mostly benefited middle society.

This chapter explores the emergence of a ‘new social contract’ – a planning initiative among Egyptian planners and international developers – and the social reform envisioned in it. The chapter first traces the emergence of the new social contract to planning initiatives conducted during the second part of the 1970s, particularly, to the 1978–82 Development Plan. The chapter later outlines the continuity in planning for socio-economic change in Egypt over time, and the re-emergence of the call for a new social contract in the Egypt Human Development Report project between 1994 and 2010. The second part of this chapter asks why, despite more than three decades of active planning, the new social contract continued to put forth similar policy recommendations when the government clearly did little to follow through with their application. I demonstrate that planning turned into a tool for obtaining economic and political rent that postponed or diluted the introduction of a new social contract in Egypt.

The birth of the new social contract

In 1961, the same year in which Egypt's initiative for the National Charter was introduced, the Egyptian Ministry for Social Affairs and Employment published a book titled The Social Constitution of the United Arab Republic. In the ‘Introduction’, Muhammad Muhammad Tawfiq ‘Abd al-Fatah, the responsible minister, explains that the purpose of this book is pedagogical – to enlighten the people, but also educators and decision makers, on the various venues available for achieving the social goals of national development. The social constitution here was a meta-text on how to guide society, as the constitution was the source of all laws. This meta-text constituted a social contract, according to ‘Abd al-Fatah, that had been narrated by the leader of the revolution and the president of the state. Arranged in ten thematic chapters, this book includes quotations from President Nasser's various public expressions that reflect different aspects of this social contract regarding social culture, the social revolution, the basic principles of society, social justice, the family, youth, rural areas, work and workers, production, cooperation and Arab nationalism.

During the oil-boom of the 1970s and early 1980s, the effendi social contract broke down in an unlikely period when the Egyptian state had regained resources that would allow it to sponsor this social contract as never before. This chapter, therefore, predates the breakdown of the effendi social contract, which is often associated with post-oil-boom economic retrenchment and the implementation of economic reform and structural adjustment (ERSA) programs in Egypt. At the same time, fast socio-economic mobility – the result of informal liberalisation of the Egyptian economy – saw the creation of a broad middle class or a middle-class society, despite the seeming demise of the effendi middle class in public discourse. In this discourse – in reality a discourse dominated by the upper-middle class – the effendi social contract broke down twice: first, as a vertical political agreement between citizens and the state and its accompanying moral economy, and second, as a horizontal social agreement among members of Egyptian middle-class society.

This chapter begins by exploring Sadat's Corrective Revolution, through an analysis of Egypt's new, 1971 constitution and the 1974 October Working Paper that officially launched the Open Door policy (infitah). In a rather paradoxical fashion, the notion of revolution here stood for preserving an existing political economy associated with Nasser and Arab socialism through its partial liberalisation by amendment or correction. The second part of this chapter, ‘Oil-Boom Populism’, further corroborates this argument by analysing growing state spending on various articles of the effendi social contract. The third part of the chapter shows that the 1977 Food Uprising enhanced the state's commitment to the provisioning of citizens. Finally, ‘Socio-economic Mobility and Its Discontents’ suggests that the effendi social contract broke down during the oil-boom era not as a result of the demise of the middle class but owing to the rapid expansion of that class – estimated to have constituted some 45 per cent of Egyptians by the mid-1980s – and the social unrest that this caused.

The Corrective Revolution

In the literature on political change in Egypt, Nasser's Arab socialism is often associated with populism, while Sadat's liberal Open Door policy is discussed as post-populist – an era in which the state retrenched employment, services and subsidies to citizens.

The 2011 Uprising in Egypt was a momentous event in Egyptian history and historiography, and one that changed the direction of my research. I was educated professionally to push against an overwhelming presence of politics in the analysis of the Middle East and to focus instead on the culture, economy and society of the region. Moreover, as an economic historian by training, and though I have been teaching the political economy of the Middle East for many years, changes in the ‘substructure’ often took priority over the political ‘superstructure’ in my research. Prior to 2011, I had studied the consumption and production of tobacco in Egyptian markets. I had also engaged with research on how the oil-boom of the 1970s and the early 1980s transformed Egypt's consumer society. The 2011 Uprising caught me and most researchers in the field by surprise, and led me to change course. In what turned out to be my next book, The Rise of the Egyptian Middle Class: Socio-Economic Mobility and Public Discontent from Nasser to Sadat, I turned to politics, class politics in particular, in studying the impact that the oil-boom, intertwined with President Sadat's liberal Open Door policy, had on Egyptian society. It was in this book that I also began to explore the class history of the Egyptian social contract.

The present book is in some respects a sequel to The Rise of the Egyptian Middle Class. The book expands the scope of analysis of the Egyptian social contract and its timeframe, from the period since semi-independence under a newly established liberal monarchy (1922) until the 2011 Uprising. As such, it picks up from an earlier point in time than most previous studies of the social contract in Egypt and it emphasises persistence over time, where past analysis often saw ruptures or new beginnings. The Egyptian Social Contract sets a broad framework for the study of the 2011 Uprising as a protest against both the breakup of the old Nasserite social contract – the effendi (local middle class) social contract discussed in this book – and the failure to bring a new social contract to Egypt.

Part three of this book explores the long, tortuous and largely unsuccessful attempt to bring about a new social contract in Egypt, through a comparison with how the old, effendi social contract was established. This comparison is based on three questions that drive the discussion in the next three chapters. The first question, which looks into the changes within the effendi middle class that supported the old social contract over time, asks what happened to this group during the oil-boom era of the 1970s and early 1980s (Chapter Five). The second asks why a long-term plan designed to offer a new social contract largely remain just that – a planning initiative with little impact on the actual process of economic reform and structural adjustment in Egypt (Chapter Six). The third question examines why – despite constant public and political outcry over the crises that it entailed – the old social contract was so entrenched and central to the moral economy of the period (Chapter Seven). Overall, Part Three investigates why attempts at socio-economic reform, which were not dissimilar to the past calls for alleviating poverty, ignorance and disease under the liberal monarchy, became an elusive search for a new social contract under Sadat and Mubarak.

The period under discussion saw the return of the Muslim Brotherhood as a dominant social force in politics and in the Egyptian economy, where an Islamic economic sector became more distinct and Islamic service provision took over in places where the state retracted from offering education, health and welfare. Nevertheless, despite giving voice to a growing political opposition, the Muslim Brotherhood – as a broad social umbrella with various, sometimes conflicting, economic interests – did not come up with a clear alternative new social contract either. The Muslim Brotherhood was central to the opposition that would stall state-led socio-economic reform, voicing concern for the struggling effendi middle class and adding an important religious undertone to the moral economy that upheld a growing coalition of discontent against the regime. However, and in a somewhat contradictory fashion, it also promoted the neoliberalisation of Egypt through private economic entrepreneurship and service provisioning.

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’.

This chapter studies the political economy of attempts to implement the new social contract in the period between the mid-1980s – the end of the oil-boom – and the January 2011 Uprising. It questions why a seeming political consensus on the need to replace the old/effendi and broken social contract, and detailed planning for how to do so, barely materialised into a new social contract for Egypt. The old social contract, despite its many deficiencies and constant calls for change, turned out to be highly stable because the socio-economic and political costs of rewriting it proved too high for both the state and the newly established (post-oil-boom) middle-class society. State and citizens either had little incentive to strive for overarching change or distrusted the other side's willingness to follow through. It is in this context that grand ideas for economic transformation, human development and democratisation often failed to live up to their promise. Instead of a change from an old to a new social contract, elements of both were increasingly layered side by side.

The chapter first studies the public discourse on the decline of the middle class. Lamented since the 1970s, the socio-economic standing of the effendi middle class had over time eroded but not degraded completely, and a new middle class that would have benefited from and supported the reforms and that constituted an alternative political constituency had barely emerged. The chapter later highlights how the contours of an existing effendi social contract shaped both the partial implementation of the economic reform and structural adjustment (ERSA) programme and the partial political reform, or democratisation, in Egypt for over twenty years. Both represented different but intertwined aspects of the new social contract. The chapter also studies how informal economic and political practices subverted most of these reforms; such informal economic and political practices invariably supported a betwixt and between status quo in which the effendi social contract eroded but did not disappear, while the new social contract was partially implemented alongside the old.

‘Farewell to the middle class’

References to the ‘middle class’ in Egyptian academic research and public discourse – the two are closely intertwined – first appeared when this social group was seemingly on the brink of its demise.

This chapter investigates how nineteenth-century concepts of liberalism in Egypt shaped that country's political economy under the liberal monarchy after semi-independence. It first focuses on social reform in Egypt – a central call of the emerging national movement – and why it remained mostly a private, philanthropic initiative to introduce tools for self-improvement to alleviate poverty, ignorance and disease, primarily through education. Such self-help schemes left little room for the state provision of services, especially those related to health, or for redistribution that would reduce economic inequality, in the form of state transferal of resources between social classes. The chapter later studies the relevant articles of the 1923 constitution, including the deliberations of the constitutional commission that first drafted and later debated these articles. I discuss articles in the constitution related to mass education because schooling was to be the only social service inscribed in this formal manifestation of the liberal social contract. In addition, I discuss what was not included in the constitution – higher education – despite its seminal centrality in national politics, and why. Similarly, the chapter examines the demand for state employment, a central demand of the emerging Egyptian national movement, and how it became legislated in the constitution. In both cases, selective and higher education leading to state employment stalled the spread of the social reform that it was meant to promote: the class interests of the effendi middle class blocked those of other social groups further down the social ladder.

Productivist welfare

From the 1870s onward, the call for social reform became an integral part of an emerging national movement in Egypt, and it was central to an effendi – personal and social – mission to bring positive change to society. Effendi intellectuals, at that time part of the socio-economic and political elite of Egypt, found common ground as agents of change: a self-conscious mission to set the conditions that would create a new society based on an enlightened civilization. They sought to create a modern, progressive society under the guise of a national society – as well as to free it from foreign occupation through the creation of an independent nation-state.

This book has set out to explore the puzzle of the social contract in Egypt – why did many of the tenets of the revolutionary social contract still hold strong decades after Nasser? Why has a new social contract still yet to materialise, despite the erosion of the older social contract? The analysis in this book has pushed against two central previous readings of the social contract in Egypt (and, more broadly, in the Middle East): that it has been mostly a top-down authoritarian bargain, and that it has been a populist bargain. Instead, offered here is a history of the social contract through an exploration of state–middle class relations and how those have shaped the social contract over time.

I have studied the trajectory of the social contract on three levels: the political discourse that brought about the making and remaking of the social contract; the relevant legislation, particularly the Egyptian constitutions in which the social contract was officially inscribed; and the actual implementation of the social contract through an analysis of state institutional capacity and state allocation of resources according to various articles of the social contract. Such cross-referencing has enabled the study of both the explicit and the implicit in Egypt's social contract, and often also the gaps between the two. The analysis demonstrates how the Egyptian social contract interacted with changing global trends in socio-economic development and governance. Such global trends, or global best practices, influenced the changing visions of the Egyptian social contract, but also its realms of possibility.

My analysis of the Egyptian social contract echoes Franz Fanon's critique of the post-colonial process in newly liberated states. I concur with Fanon that the political dominance of national middle classes created a gap between national liberation and the liberation of those most in need within the nation because this middle class followed its own self-interests rather than those of the masses. I have studied how a self-centred effendi vision and practice of socio-economic development shaped that of the nation, and how an effendi social contract directed socio-economic development in Egypt over time.

Chapter Three contrasts with two previous assertions about the Egyptian social contract: first, that it was established under Nasser, and second, that this social contract was largely the result of a new authoritarian bargain in which the state would boost allocations to citizens in return for political quiescence. Regarding the first assertion, the effendi social contract, at the centre of which was a rising demand for social justice – an increase in equality, opportunity and equity – was by then well established. Indeed, the main reason for the 1952 revolution was the broad consensus that there was a gap between this social contract and the political ability (or willingness) to follow through with it. From this perspective, I concur with Sara Salem's analysis that ‘Nasserism, formed in the early 1950s, was an instance of hegemony rather than domination’ and initially, at least, was more about consent than coercion because it would be based on a broad agreement regarding the required changes. As I discuss in this chapter and the next, the 1952 revolution did away with the old regime because that regime was accused of sluggishness in making the social contract happen, rather than because of a desire to replace the social contract. Regarding the second assertion, that the social contract was a top-down political dictate, or authoritarian bargain, I argue that this assertion is the result of reading history backward in time, as opposed to events unfolding from past to present. Nasser's regime did turn out to be authoritarian, but by then there was broad popular – read effendi middle class – support for state command of social affairs and economic development. Top-down and middle-up backing for the dominant state closely interacted.

Chapter Three outlines the continuity in Egypt's official, vertical social contract – as found in the state's constitution, as elaborated in the First Five Year Development Plan, and as culminated in the National Charter. As this chapter aims to establish, the Free Officers came to power on a wave of unprecedented effendi middle class expectation of social justice, regardless of the growing use of ‘the people’ or ‘the masses’ in official discourse.

In the aftermath of the 1977 Food Uprising – which had shocked Egyptian politicians and the public – an official call for a new social contract, a new agreement between citizens and their state, emerged. First appearing in Egypt's Development Plan for the years 1978–82, this new social contract (ʿaqd ijtimaʿi), if implemented, would set Egypt on a new intertwined economic and political course. It would also partly liberalise the economy and, in tandem, democratise politics. In 2008, some four decades later, the newly established Social Contract Advisory, Monitoring and Coordination Centre was a joint project between the Egyptian government and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), whose purpose was, yet again, to promote this new social contract. During the intervening years, there was a broad consensus in Egypt that the old social contract had been broken, and various state economic and political reforms that were to replace it were put in place. As the 2011 Egyptian Uprising clearly demonstrated, the new social contract had barely materialised, and the reforms associated with it hardly constituted a wilful agreement between citizens and their state.

The Egyptian Social Contract sets out to explore the intricacies of the making, partial breaking and persistence of the old social contract, from the time that the semi-independent state was established (1922) until the 2011 Egyptian Uprising. It offers a history of the social contract that centres on analysis of state–middle class relations in Egypt and how these relations have shaped the social contract and Egyptian society over time. In particular the book probes the circumstances in which these relations brought about the intertwining of socio-economic development and governance in this contract. In this political economy, state-led socio-economic development took precedence over the political participation of citizens, or democracy. Later, economic and political reforms scarcely unfolded as planned, because Egypt's ruling elite, but equally its middle-class society, did not consider a new social contract desirable – each for their own reasons. The book therefore attempts a more nuanced analysis of the ‘authoritarian bargain’, as it is often portrayed in the literature on authoritarianism in Egypt and the Middle East. Such analysis sheds light on a central conundrum that preoccupies many regarding Egypt and the region today: how to promote a just and sustainable social contract in the region.

Zack Snyder's 300 (2006) quickly produced three things when it premiered: unprecedented box-office success, political outrage, and scathing reviews from film and culture critics. Based on Frank Miller's 1998 graphic novel of the same name, 300 portrays the Battle of Thermopylae, in which an elite unit of 300 Spartans fought to the last man in defense of their homeland by resisting a massive Persian invasion in 480 bce. Commentators blasted its vapid dialogue, the endless parade of stylized gore, and the overall cartoonishness of the Spartans, rendered simultaneously hypermasculine and homoerotic by their oiled bodies, bulging muscles, and skimpy briefs. Above all, critics lamented 300's negative depiction of Eastern peoples: from their military inferiority to their monstrous appearance, from their slavish mentality to their polymorphous and depraved sexuality, Snyder's Persians embodied Orientalist stereotypes. The outrage over these images was enhanced by their timing, as 300 debuted in the midst of escalating tension between the United States and countries in the Middle East. The Iranian government formally denounced the movie, while Snyder infuriated many by refusing to see any contemporary links to his story of East versus West.

Although 300 undeniably is guilty of bad taste and cultural insensitivity, Snyder's blockbuster contains content worthy of serious analysis, based on its implication in three separate but related golden ages. The first is the golden age of the superhero movie, which began in the late 1990s but hit its stride in the 2000s, and within which 300's portrayal of especially Leonidas should be viewed. By relying on the superhero movie's standard narrative motifs, 300 provides its own set of viewing instructions, so that the audience may consume a movie about ancient Greek history on familiar terms. The second is the modern historiographic tradition of valorizing the Battle of Thermopylae within the grand narrative of “the West,” especially as enabling the classical, or golden, age of fifth-century bce Greece.

This consistent heroizing of Leonidas and the 300 derives from an ancient approach to recording historical events. The fifth-century Greek historian Herodotus, modernity's main ancient source for the Greco-Persian Wars, conveys the magnitude and significance of Thermopylae by comparing Leonidas and his Spartans to the legendary warriors populating Homer's epic poem the Iliad, a foundational text of Greek identity encoding cultural values and principles.

In the opening moments of “Once a Hero” (1996), Episode 2.14 of the television series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1995–9; henceforward HTLJ), the merchant Falafel resolutely attempts to sell his merchandise to Hercules. “Buy a souvenir to remember your visit to Argos!”, he urges. “I have actual strands of the golden fleece!” Hercules politely declines, but Falafel will not be dissuaded: “A model of the Argo! Detailed replica of the famous ship that carried Jason and his crew on their quest!” With a wry smile, Hercules dryly remarks, “I've already seen it.” This exchange cheekily acknowledges that “Once a Hero” functions as a kind of sequel to the voyage of the Argo in Greek myth, with some of the Argonauts, including Hercules, reuniting in their former leader Jason's palace on the tenth anniversary of their return to Greece with the golden fleece. The fleece is soon stolen, however, and the Argonauts, led by Jason – assisted and mentored by Hercules – set out on a second expedition to retrieve it.

Yet “Once a Hero” is not just a rehash of the first voyage, for Jason's circumstances have changed for the worse. Now a morose alcoholic reeling over his ex-wife Medea's murder of their children, Jason is consumed with self-pitying delusions of supernatural persecution. The fleece is a tangible symbol of Jason's heroism and the specific construction of masculinity that HTLJ promotes as inextricably linked with it. By regaining the fleece during the episode, he will become the titular “hero” once again: a version of classical heroism refracted through the peplum, or “sword and sandal,” film, a cinematic genre that informed the sensibilities of the generation to which HTLJ's creators belonged. Yet HTLJ's nostalgic backward glance at the peplum genre's depiction of masculinity does not mean that “Once a Hero” is slavishly devoted to the past represented by those films. While depicting its Medea as the femme fatale common to peplum films, HTLJ's creative staff responds to “the decade of ‘girl power’ and riot grrrls” of the 1990s by creating a new female Argonaut, Phoebe.