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Egypt and the Myth of the New Middle Class: A Comparative Analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Amos Perlmutter
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley

Extract

Authors in recent literature on developing polities have been searching for a middle class that could and, some even argue, should assume primary responsibility for all phases of development: social, economic, and political. This middle class has been identified as the New Middle Class (NMC). In contrast to the “old” middle class, the authors maintain, the NMC will create leaders; is more numerous; possesses organizational skills; is honest; develops forward-looking “new men”; in short, is shouldering, and should shoulder, social and political change.

Type
Aspects of Political Community
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1967

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References

1 Halpern, Manfred, The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa (Princeton, 1963), pp. 5178. See especially footnotes 3 and 4 on pp. 54–55, also pp. 56–57, on the qualities of this new class, and on Young's and Johnson's evidence for the emergence of what Johnson prefers to call the “middle sectors” (a designation accepted by Halpern), as a new class, in developing areas.Google Scholar

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4 Ibid., p. 274.

5 Ibid., p. 54, footnote 4.

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7 Op cit., pp. 54–55. “Among these two [Johnson and Young] and the present essay, there are common intellectual lines.”

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46 Ibid., p. 58.

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69 Again we caution with Bendix against the “fallacy of retrospective determinism” (Bendix, , Nation Building, op. cit., p. 208)Google Scholar, in comparing such different states, social structures, and political practices. Egypt under Muhammad Ali suffered from total lack of local political autonomy. In Japan and Prussia local government was fairly well established and acted as an intermediary between the national government and the people. Once harnessed to national authority, local authorities acted to diffuse political and economic policies and were thus instrumental in reform. Comparing political management with the emergence of autonomous political structures and practices in Japan and Prussia and its absence in Egypt only demonstrates the extraordinary burdens which have been relegated to the NMC. On the rise of central power in Japan see Whitney, John Hall's seminal Government and Local Power in Japan 500 to 1700 (Princeton, 1966Google Scholar); on Prussian bureaucracy see Hans Rosenberg's excellent treatise Bureaucracy, Aristocracy and Autocracy: The Prussian Experience 1660–1815 (Harvard, 1966).Google Scholar

70 This is borrowed from Wolin, Sheldon, Politics and Vision (New York, Little, Brown, 1960), p. 7.Google Scholar

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