This paper analyzes two arenas of elite and popular mobilizations in early independence Lebanon (1943-1958). The first centered on the cost, ownership, and working conditions of two public utilities: tramways and electricity. Focusing on Beirut, I explore the interaction of consumers, workers, businesses, and government officials. The second arena involved the fate of the agricultural sector. Focusing on the Beqaa Valley, I specifically attend to the interactions of landowners, peasants, and would-be rural émigrés. Conflict around both these systems represented two of the central arenas of elite and popular mobilizations that constituted the broader set of struggles to define the political economy of Lebanon, which was ultimately organized around an open laissez-faire service-based economy. First, I explore the shifting patterns of alliances and conflicts that animated these struggles, which ultimately shaped the nature of state-market relations in the post-colonial political economy of Lebanon. I highlight how these struggles were informed by the normative and institutional legacies of the Ottoman Empire and French mandate, but ultimately shaped by the strategies of elite and popular groups that were mobilized around said institutional arrangements: public utilities and land tenure. Neither sectarian (e.g., Maronite vs. Sunni) nor sectoral (e.g., commercial vs. industrial) interests alone sufficiently explain the patterns of alliance and conflict under consideration. The model of collective action that I utilize locates agency in networks that cut across classes, sectarian identities, and corporate interests, bringing together partners who might be united for particular short- or long-term goals. These networks were manifested through both formal (e.g., party affiliation) and informal (e.g., marriage) relationships. Second, I analyze how “the Lebanese state” was (re)produced through specific representational practices that were normalized through these struggles. Explicit discourses about the state and the economy saturated public cultural texts, including newspapers, government reports, and political leaflets. I thus argue that the making of specific state institutions (and thus Lebanon’s economy) was itself the making of “the Lebanese nation-state” as a form of political sociability. Both lines of inquiry—the struggles around public utilities in Beirut and land tenure in the Beqaa Valley as well as the attendant cultural constitution of “the Lebanese state”—shed light on processes of state and market formation in early independence Lebanon. Thus, my paper poses a challenge to prevailing narratives of Lebanese politics in these years and highlights the contingency of state-led economic development in the Middle East and other late developing countries.