Egyptian colonial liberalism prioritized obedience and order over equal rights.

Evidence

The donkey driver’s statement about an age of liberty has been cited to illustrate a major theme of the book, that Egyptians must be taught the principle of equality before the law. But these words come from the mouth of an insolent peasant. The concern of the book is not with equality of rights but with social chaos, a chaos suddenly visible in the indiscipline of the city’s streets where the peasant behaves as an equal of the Pasha. Indiscipline is not usually considered a central concern of liberal thought, but rather than abandoning the label of liberalism I would prefer to use these writings from Egypt to understand liberalism in its colonial context. Egyptian liberalism spoke about justice and legal rights; but these concerns were contained within a wider problematic. Rights could only be enjoyed within a society of obedient and industrious individuals, and it was these characteristics, as we have seen, that Egyptians now suddenly seemed to lack. Liberalism was the language of a new social class, threatened by the absence of the mental habits of industry and obedience which would make possible a social order. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 371

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Inverts the standard reading of liberalism as rights-egalitarianism — shows colonial liberalism as a class language concerned with discipline and social order. Dense and paradigm-shifting in the way it recontextualizes a political term.
• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s work on discipline and to the earlier chapters of this book on the ordering of Egyptian society through schooling and military discipline.