Ibn Khaldun · Civilisations
How Ibn Khaldun, in fourteenth-century North Africa, founded an entirely new science - the study of human society and civilisation itself - four centuries before sociology had a name.
In 1377, in a moment of retreat in a castle in North Africa, the statesman and scholar Ibn Khaldun began writing the Muqaddimah (‘Introduction’) to his vast universal history - and in it announced the founding of an entirely new science. Not history as the chronicle of events, but a science of the underlying nature, causes, and patterns of human civilisation and social organisation itself - what he called ilm al-umran, the science of civilisation or social organisation. He proposed to study scientifically the nature of human society, the causes of the rise and fall of civilisations and dynasties, the patterns underlying the histories of all peoples. With this, Ibn Khaldun founded - almost single-handedly, in the fourteenth century - what we would now call sociology and the philosophy of history, centuries ahead of their time.
Ibn Khaldun also revolutionised the critical evaluation of historical reports. Historians, he complained, too often uncritically repeated absurd and impossible stories - exaggerated numbers, fabricated tales, implausible reports - without testing them against reason and the known nature of things. He proposed a rigorous critical method: testing historical reports against the nature of civilisation and society - rejecting reports that violate what we know of how societies actually work, that are inherently implausible or impossible given the nature of human social organisation. A report of an impossibly vast army, for instance, can be rejected because it violates what we know of the capacity of societies to raise and supply armies. By testing reports against the known nature of society and civilisation, the historian can sift the plausible from the absurd, the true from the fabricated. This critical method - testing historical reports against the science of society and the nature of civilisation - was a major advance in historical method, and one of the foundations of critical historiography.
Ibn Khaldun is now widely recognised as a founder - perhaps the founder - of sociology and the scientific study of society, centuries ahead of his time. His Muqaddimah founded the science of human civilisation and social organisation (sociology); pioneered the scientific study of the causes and patterns of the rise and fall of civilisations (historical sociology and the philosophy of history); developed a critical method for evaluating historical reports (critical historiography); and made profound contributions to the understanding of social cohesion, economics, the state, urban and rural life, and much else. He achieved all this in the fourteenth century, four and a half centuries before Auguste Comte coined the word ‘sociology’ and claimed to found the science of society. The recognition of Ibn Khaldun’s achievement - as the founder of sociology and the scientific study of society, centuries ahead of his time - is one of the great rediscoveries in the history of thought, restoring to its rightful place one of the most original and prophetic minds in human history.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Ibn Khaldun founded a new science of human society and civilisation. Explain what was new about it, and how it differed from ordinary history, in your own words.
Leads to Auguste Comte.
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