In an interview, Mr. Rachid said he felt like a scapegoat. “People who have been supporting liberal reforms or an open economy are being caught up in the anticorruption campaign,” he said. “My case is one of them.”

“Now there are a lot of voices from the past talking about nationalization  ‘Why do we need a private sector?’ ” he added. He declined to talk specifically about the military but said that in general within the government, “some people have tried to say that the cause of the revolution was simply economic reform.”

Though some Western analysts have guessed that the military’s empire makes up as much as a third of Egypt’s economy, Mr. Rachid said it was in fact less than 10 percent. But economists say that because of its vested interests they still worry that the military will impede the continuation of the transition from the state-dominated economy established under President Gamal Abdel Nasser to a more open and efficient free market that advanced under Mr. Mubarak.

Moreover, the military’s power to guide policy is, at the moment, unchecked. The military has invited no civilian input into the transitional government, and it has enjoyed such a surge in prestige since it helped usher out Mr. Mubarak that almost no one in the opposition is criticizing it.

“We trust them,” said Walid Rachid, a member of the April 6 Youth Movement that helped set off the revolt. “Because of the army our revolution has become safe.”

Some of the young revolutionaries at the vanguard of the revolt identify themselves as leftists or socialists. And the idea of liberalizing the economy was thrown into disrepute because of the corrupt way that the Mubarak government carried out privatization, bestowing fortunes on a small circle around the ruling party while leaving most Egyptians struggling against grinding poverty and rampant inflation.