ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the role secular intellectuals and political of the 1940s played in the transition from the pluralist political system of the monarchy to the authoritarian regime of the Nasserist era. It utilizes the term modernism for ideologies belonging to modernity during the period in European history that spans roughly from 1800 to 1950. Modernity is usually associated with industrialization, urbanization, the technological revolution, the rise of a mass society, the development of political ideologies, and the establishment of the nation-state. Central to Egyptian thinkers of the 1930s and the 1940s is the realization that modernity involves the emergence of the view of society as to be created and constructed by the state. Only in the second half of the 1950s did younger generation of reformist Egyptian intellectuals have the feeling that Egypt was entering into a stage of modernity. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
