Much of the scholarship on the history of Lebanon implicitly or explicitly claims that individuals, social groups, and the political process in the country were not sufficiently in line with those patterns and dynamics that constitute historical modernity. Central to these narratives are two phenomena, which historians often point to but rarely interrogate. In the past fifteen years, historians and other scholars have effectively challenged the notion that sectarianism is a “traditional” phenomenon. Instead, they have analyzed the ways in which it is fundamentally implicated in the experience of modernity. More specifically, for these scholars, sectarianism is a modern phenomenon rather than a pre-modern holdover. Yet the notion of a minimalist or non-existent state in Lebanon has received little challenge, even among those scholars that have argued for the fundamental modernity of sectarianism. This paper challenges narratives of the state in modern Lebanon by attending to the bureaucratic expansion of public institutions during the early independence period (1946-1955). It highlights the antecedents in the French colonial and even late Ottoman periods vis-à-vis the introduction of instruments of modern governance. The paper also posits an alternative to the formulation of the early independence period as one of a Merchant Republic, in which the political economy of Lebanon was defined by an open economy and lazes-faire state. On the contrary, I argue that this period was marked by an extensive quantitative, qualitative, and geographic expansion in the bureaucratic reach of state institutions. Yet such bureaucratic expansion was characterized by contentious debates and mobilizations on the part of elite and non-elite groups. At issue were competing notions of how to organize political representation, economic development, and relationships between various social groups. The pivot of differences was not modernity itself, but rather how to come to terms with the experience of modernity. Drawing on a diverse array of Arabic, French, and English primary sources, such as the local and foreign press, legal codes, ministerial reports, diplomatic communications, political party and labor union documents, and oral histories, the paper demonstrates that multiple sides in the struggles over political representation or economic development laid claim to the concept of modernity in advancing their particular vision for the political economy of Lebanon.