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.