This paper writes engineers into the history of Lebanese political-economic and nationalist thought. Historians of Lebanon’s post-independence period (1943-1958) have emphasized how a narrow, elite “consortium” espoused a national ideology that authorized laissez-faire monetary and trade policies. These intellectuals and businessmen invoked environmental determinism to claim that trade, tourism, and services were Lebanon’s national vocation. A particular masculine subject, the ocean-going entrepreneur, epitomized this vocation. This paper reveals that engineers formed an influential counter-current that reinterpreted these nationalist principles. Against strict laissez-faire, Lebanese engineer-bureaucrats like Ibrahim Abd-El-Al and Joseph Naggear advocated statist developmentalism. They saw the post-independence era as an opportunity to raise their profession’s status and redefine bourgeois culture and its relationship to governing institutions according to their conceptions of modernity. Critical to this project was reshaping the parameters of Lebanese national subjectivity. Reinterpreting the consortium’s environmental determinist narrative, Ibrahim Abd-El-Al portrayed rational development of water resources and agriculture as an organic expression of national identity. Drawing on climatic, hydrological, and archaeological research, Abd-El-Al asserted a second national archetype, the rational, rugged mountain peasant, who had mastered the economic use of limited water and soil resources. By writing Lebanese fallahin into bourgeois conceptions of national identity, Abd-El-Al and Naggear called attention to urban-rural inequalities and advocated state-led agricultural development. To make these arguments, they spoke paternalistically—even condescendingly—on behalf of Lebanon’s rural margins. And, ultimately, their statist project demonstrated the limits of a bourgeois critique of laissez-faire by reproducing and maintaining that regime of accumulation’s constitutive divisions, inequalities, and injustices. Within those limits, Abd-El-Al and Naggear warned of laissez-faire’s dangerous capacity to impoverish the rural margins and pushed the government to recognize its responsibility to Lebanon’s rural majority. Moreover, they cultivated a critical and technically literate reading public that favored statism, and shaped how that public understood their national subjectivity and relationship to the natural world.