L’Égypte de Nasser : classes moyennes et idéal socialiste (1952-1970)

This book, which originates in a doctoral dissertation defended at Sorbonne University in June 2024, reconstructs the conceptual history of the Arabic “middle class” (al-ṭabaqa al-wusṭā / al-ṭabaqa al-mutawassiṭa) in Nasser’s Egypt (1952–1970). Rather than taking the “middle class” as a self-evident social actor, it examines how Egyptian political leaders, intellectuals, and sociologists mobilized, stretched, and disputed the term in Arabic, thereby departing from a historiography that has tended to treat the Nasser era as the triumphant moment of a middle class defined from the outside. The book defetishizes this unstable expression by foregrounding the shifting work of definition, correction, and symbolic boundary-drawing through which “the middle class” emerged in the 1950s and 1960s as both a nationalist narrative resource and, increasingly, a statistical and sociological indicator of development around which the Nasserist state imagined its national future. By unpacking the palimpsest of Western and local philosophical and economic influences sedimented in the concept, the study offers a new vantage point from which to revisit the history of Egypt under Nasser, along with the aspirations projected onto “the middle class” by the regime and by wider segments of the population in the age of development.