Egypt’s modern military schools were run by French disciples of Comte and Saint-Simonism.

Evidence

Besides the barracks and the training camps, the new military order included more than a dozen schools for training specialised military cadres – including cavalry, artillery, infantry, and naval officers, signalmen, doctors and veterinarians, regimental bands, and engineers. The schools were to employ the same disciplinary methods, based on ‘the confinement of the students’ and ‘a regime of surveillance and constraint’. Most of them were administered by French and Egyptian military engineers and scholars, many of whom had been trained at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, including several disciples of Saint-Simon and of his secretary Auguste Comte. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 142

Categorization

• XREF: Positivism/Comte connects to the reader’s interest in the intellectual genealogy of planning and technocratic governance.