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Kompass

Thinkers and political figures

Bronze bust of Ibn Khaldun in the Casbah of Béjaïa, Algeria.

Portrait: Photograph by Reda Kerbush, via Wikimedia Commons (opens in a new tab) · Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0

Ibn Khaldun

Country
Tunis and Cairo
Era
1332–1406
Tradition
Historical sociology

Historian and judge who explained the rise and collapse of dynasties through asabiyyah — group solidarity — and in doing so founded something close to sociology four centuries before the word existed.

01

Documented positions

Documented positions come from the sources listed. Similarity is this project’s inference from those positions, and is a much weaker claim.

  • Argued that dynasties rise on group solidarity and fall as urban luxury dissolves it, typically within four generations
  • Held that excessive taxation destroys the productive activity it is levied on, reducing total revenue
  • Treated religion as a force that can multiply group solidarity rather than as the foundation of the state by itself
  • Distinguished government based on rational statecraft from government based on revealed law, and analysed both
  • Held that justice is the precondition of civilisation and that oppression by rulers causes societies to decay
02

Where it sits on each dimension

Wealth and inequality

55

Evidence: Documented

The state in the economy

62

Evidence: Documented

Religion and the state

70

Evidence: Documented

Crime and punishment

45

Evidence: Documented

Dimensions left unscored, for want of evidence: Personal liberty, Tradition and change, Nation and the world, Power and its limits, Environment and growth

Sources

  • Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History · 1377
  • Robert Irwin, Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography · Princeton University Press · 2018

Last verified: