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phenomenon noted by Alexis de Tocqueville in his masterful analysis
of the origins of the French Revolution and raised again in the early
1960s by James Davies’s well known “J-curve” theory of
revolution.2
Something like this Huntingtonian process has unfolded in recent
months in both Tunisia and Egypt. In both cases, anti-government
protests were led not by the urban poor or by an Islamist
underground, but by relatively well-educated middle-class young
people used to communicating with each other via Facebook and
Twitter. It is no accident that Wael Ghonim, Google’s regional head
of marketing, emerged as a symbol and leader of the new Egypt. The
protesters’ grievances centered around the fact that the authoritarian
regimes of Ben Ali and Mubarak offered them no meaningful
pathway to political participation, as well as failing to provide jobs
befitting their social status. The protests were then joined by other
groups in both societies—trade unionists, Islamists, peasants and
virtually everyone else unhappy with the old regimes—but the
driving force remained the more modern segments of Tunisian and
Egyptian society.
Societies lacking institutions that could accommodate new social
actors produced a condition Huntington labeled praetorianism, in
which political participation took the form of strikes, demonstrations,
protests and violence. The military often seized power in such
circumstances because it was the only organized actor in society
capable of running a government. The Egyptian Republic’s first
autocrat, Gamal Abdel Nasser, came to power in precisely this
manner back in July 1952, when his Free Officers movement
represented the rising Egyptian middle class. The tragedy of modern
Egypt is that there has been scarcely any meaningful political
development in the more than half-century since then—meaning, in

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