- Length
- 480 pagesRosenthal, abridged by Dawood, Princeton, 1969
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
The Muqaddimah
A book that invented a discipline and then had no successors for four centuries. Ibn Khaldun set out to give historians a way of judging whether a report was possible, and produced in the attempt the first systematic account of how societies hold together and come apart.
- Date
- 1377
- Author
- Ibn Khaldun
- Region
- Ifriqiya, Egypt and the Maghreb
- Language
- Arabic
- 1863 French, William de Slane The translation that introduced the book to Europe Attested
- 1958 English, Franz Rosenthal Complete in three volumes; in copyright Attested
- 1969 English, Rosenthal, abridged by Dawood The standard reading edition; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Solitary — No documented reply on either side
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Demonstration — Proof from premises the opponent already grants
- Transmission
- Translated — Reached its later readers in another language
- Standing
- Revived — Out of circulation and read again
Read in Ottoman circles from the seventeenth century, unknown in Europe until the nineteenth, and without a successor in its own tradition for four hundred years.
What the book says
An introduction to a history of the world that turned into the founding text of a science its author had to name himself. Ibn Khaldun begins with a complaint: historians repeat what they are told, and have no way of telling a plausible report from an absurd one because they have no theory of what human societies can and cannot do. He proposes to supply one, and calls it the science of human social organisation. Its central concept is group feeling - the solidarity that binds a kin group or a tribe and makes collective action possible - and its central claim is that this is the engine of political power. Desert and steppe peoples live hard and cooperate closely, so their group feeling is strong; settled peoples live comfortably, specialise, and lose it. A group with strong solidarity conquers a soft city, founds a dynasty, and then the dynasty's own success destroys the thing that built it: within roughly four generations luxury, taxation and the replacement of kinsmen by paid officials have hollowed out the cohesion, and a new group from outside repeats the cycle. Around this framework he builds accounts of economics, taxation, crafts, education, prices, the effects of climate, and the limits of what philosophy can establish.
What it argues
That history has regularities, and that a historian who does not know them cannot assess evidence. The regularities are not moral and not providential: they follow from how people get their living and how closely they depend on each other. Solidarity is highest where survival requires it and decays where it does not, so political power moves from the margin to the centre and then dissolves. The corollaries are equally naturalistic. Taxes low at a dynasty's beginning encourage production and yield more; raised as the dynasty grows expensive, they choke it and yield less. Cities generate crafts, sciences and luxury together, and luxury is the mechanism of decline rather than its symptom. Human beings differ by habit and circumstance rather than by nature.
No work is recorded as the target of this book, and none is recorded as answering it.
How it argues
By generalisation from cases, and by a rule he states at the outset: a report is to be tested against what is possible in the nature of social organisation, not against the authority of who transmitted it. That is a methodological break with the scholarship of his world, which assessed reports by the reliability of the chain of transmitters. The prose is direct and unrhetorical and the examples are drawn from the politics he had worked in, which is why the book reads as observation rather than speculation.
The moment
The fourteenth-century Maghreb, in the aftermath of the Black Death, which killed Ibn Khaldun's parents and much of his teachers' generation, and amid the collapse of dynasty after dynasty in North Africa and Spain. He served nearly all of them as minister, negotiator or judge, changed sides repeatedly, was imprisoned, and once went as an envoy to Timur outside the walls of Damascus. The theory of dynastic cycles is written by a man who had watched several from inside and been employed by most of them.
How it travelled
Sideways, late, and then all at once. The book was known and used by Ottoman historians from the seventeenth century, where it had genuine influence on how the empire's own decline was discussed. In its own Arab west it left no school. Europe encountered it in the nineteenth century, when extracts appeared and then de Slane's French translation of the 1860s, and the reaction was astonishment - here was a theory of social causation written four hundred years before anything comparable in Europe. Twentieth-century readers made him a founder of sociology, of economics and of the philosophy of history in turn, which is more claim than any one book can carry.
The strongest objection
That the cycle is a description dressed as a law. Ibn Khaldun's four-generation dynasty fits the North African cases he knew and fits others badly or not at all, and the theory has no account of why a society might break the pattern - which is what several did. The deeper problem is that group feeling is defined largely by its effects: where a dynasty succeeded, solidarity was strong; where it failed, solidarity had decayed. Used that way the concept cannot be tested, and the sharpest modern criticism of the book is not that it is wrong but that it is difficult to see what would count as showing it wrong.
Why read it
Because it is readable, surprising and unlike anything else written before the modern period - a fourteenth-century book about taxation, urbanisation and the limits of state capacity, with a theory attached. The opening chapters on method and the sections on dynasties and on cities are the ones to read, and the Dawood abridgement is the sensible entry point.
- First printed
- 1858
- First in English
- 1958
- Digitised
- Yes
The Muqaddimah is the prologue to a much longer universal history and is almost always printed and read alone. Ibn Khaldun revised it repeatedly and the manuscripts represent different states.
de Slane's French of 1863-68 opened the field. Rosenthal's complete English of 1958 and the Dawood abridgement are in copyright.
Where it stands
Revived and possibly over-claimed. The Muqaddimah is a standard text in the history of social thought and is genuinely read rather than merely cited; the argument now is about how much of modern sociology it anticipates and how much has been read into it by admirers looking for a precursor.
On quoting this book
The Arabic is public domain, but the English translations are modern and in copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
How far Ibn Khaldun should be called a founder of sociology is disputed and the enthusiasm of nineteenth- and twentieth-century readers has been questioned as projection. Whether he intended a universal theory or an account of the Maghreb is argued from the text itself. His own political conduct - serving and abandoning a long succession of rulers - has been read both as opportunism and as the behaviour his theory would predict of anyone in his position. And the relation between the Muqaddimah and the vast history it introduces, which almost nobody reads, is rarely examined.