ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the way in which liberal, socialist, and communist intellectuals supported and helped formulate the discourse of authoritarian modernism in the second half of the 1950s. The discourse of authoritarian modernism gained its position of hegemony because of their acceptance of many of its features and their willingness to support and expand it. For Ahmad Baha al-Din the role of the middle classes as the vanguard of the nationalist movement also implies their cultural hegemony and imposes on them the task of defining the Egyptian collective personality. The communist historians explain the specific, “distorted” character of Egyptian history by pointing to the early absence of a bourgeoisie in Egypt that would fulfill its task as the carrier of enlightenment and democracy. Part of the task of Egyptian Marxist historiography therefore was to clarify the rise of the new authoritarian state and justify their acceptance of it by mapping the peculiar Egyptian road to modernity.
