Ibn Khaldun

Ibn Khaldun

In the fourteenth century a Tunisian-born statesman and judge sat down to write a history of the world, and in its long introduction he founded a science that would not have a name in Europe for another five hundred years: the study of human society itself. Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah sets out the laws by which civilizations rise and fall, names the social solidarity that builds empires and the luxury that quietly dissolves it, and analyzes the economics of labor and taxation with an eye that looks startlingly modern. He is among the most original minds of the Middle Ages and a true founder of the social sciences.

The corpus and how the chat answers. Ibn Khaldun's masterwork is the Muqaddimah (1377), the Prolegomena to his vast universal history. The standard English translation, Franz Rosenthal's of 1958, is under copyright; the public-domain routes are Baron de Slane's French Prolégomènes (1862 to 1868) and the Arabic original, and a future pass could add either in the site's original-language practice. For now this room answers from training knowledge, says so plainly, and cites the Muqaddimah by chapter and section rather than by a retrieved passage. Expect citations to the Muqaddimah by chapter.

Life. Ibn Khaldun was born in 1332 in Tunis, into a family of Andalusian origin that had left Seville generations before. His life was thrown about by the turbulent politics of the late-medieval Maghrib: he served as secretary, diplomat, and minister to a succession of rival courts across North Africa and Muslim Spain, rose and fell from favor, knew prison and exile, and at last withdrew to a desert fortress where, in a sustained burst of insight, he wrote the Muqaddimah. Later he became a judge in Mamluk Cairo and, in a famous episode, parleyed with the conqueror Tamerlane outside the walls of Damascus. His hard, first-hand knowledge of how dynasties grow and crumble became the raw material of his science.

Where to begin. The Muqaddimah is the work. Read its opening on the nature of history and the new science it proposes, then the central chapters on group solidarity and the life-cycle of dynasties, and then the rich later chapters on economics, crafts, cities, and the rise and fall of the sciences.

A new science of civilization. Ibn Khaldun announces, in full awareness of his own originality, a science that did not exist before him: the science of human social organization, of civilization. History, he insists, is not a chronicle of names and battles but a field governed by its own causes and laws, and the historian must test every report against what is actually possible in the nature of society, throwing out the implausible however often it has been repeated. He looks beneath the surface of events for the social forces that produce them. It is, in all but name, the founding of sociology and of a scientific philosophy of history.

Asabiyyah, the engine of history. His central idea is asabiyyah, group feeling or social solidarity, the cohesive bond that unites a people and gives them the collective power to act, to fight, and to rule. It runs strongest among hardy peoples bred to the austere life of the desert and the steppe, where survival depends on the group, and it runs weakest among the comfortable populations of great cities. Strong solidarity is what allows a group to conquer and to found a dynasty; it is the social energy out of which political power is built.

The life-cycle of dynasties. From asabiyyah Ibn Khaldun derives a cyclical law of history. A group with fierce solidarity, forged in the hardship of nomadic life, overcomes the soft cities and founds a dynasty. Its descendants, surrounded by the wealth and refinement of settled civilization, grow cultured but soft, and their solidarity corrodes generation by generation; the dynasty turns despotic, over-taxes its subjects, loses the loyalty that raised it, and after roughly three generations, some four-score years and more, falls to a fresh group carrying strong solidarity in from the margins. The very civilization that solidarity creates is what unmakes the solidarity. On this wheel, for Ibn Khaldun, history turns.

The economics of society. Ibn Khaldun is a remarkably modern economic thinker. He roots the value of a thing in the labor that goes into it, treats the division of labor and human cooperation as the true source of a society's wealth, and traces the economic arc of a dynasty from vigor to exhaustion. Most striking of all, he sets out, six centuries early, the insight that light taxes encourage enterprise and so swell the revenue, while taxes piled ever higher in a dynasty's declining years finally choke the production they feed on and shrink the very revenue they were meant to raise, a pattern modern economists would rediscover for themselves.

Against the chronicler. Ibn Khaldun's method is critical and causal. He mocks the historians who hand on absurd tales without ever testing them against reason and the settled nature of things, and he holds that the same social forces operate in every age and place, so that the past can be understood through laws and not merely recorded. He was no lonely curiosity but a rigorous social scientist, and if the particular shape of his cyclical model bears the imprint of the North African world he knew, its method, the search for the natural causes of social facts, is simply the method of the human sciences themselves.

Reception, and adjacent reading. Honored for centuries in the Islamic and Ottoman world, the Muqaddimah was rediscovered by Europe in the nineteenth century and hailed by Arnold Toynbee as perhaps the greatest work of its kind ever created by any mind. Read now, Ibn Khaldun is the founder of the science of society and of the philosophy of history, the thinker who first hunted for the natural laws behind the rise and fall of states. He worked within the Aristotelian tradition that Averroes had carried in the Muslim West; his cyclical vision of history strikingly anticipates, with no line of influence between them, the new science of Giambattista Vico three centuries later; his sociology of peoples and laws looks forward to Montesquieu; and his conviction that history is moved by material and social forces, by solidarity, economics, and the life of cities, makes him a distant forerunner of Karl Marx, while his cool gaze on the natural growth and decay of states sets him beside Machiavelli in another tradition entirely. His wheel of solidarity and luxury still turns in every theory of why empires fall.