The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (125 page)

Ibn Khaldun
(Abd al-Rahman Abu Zaid Wali al-Din ibn Khaldun
, 1332–1406)

Historian, sociologist, and philosopher, born in Tunis. His reputation rests on
The Book of Exemplaries and the Collection of Origins and Information respecting the History of the Arabs, Foreigners, and Berbers and Others who possess Great Power
completed in 1377 and published in seven volumes in Cairo in 1867. It is essentially a historical account of the peoples of North Africa, whose introduction contains his theory and method of analysing history.
Ibn Khaldun was educated in the various branches of Arabic learning—Qur'
n, grammar, language, law, logic, mathematics, philosophy, natural science, traditions, and poetry. In Egypt in 1348 he began a second career in the judiciary, serving as the chief Qadi of the Maliki school of jurisprudence.
Ibn Khaldun lived at a time of disruption and instability throughout the Islamic world. The lands of the Levant had been subject to the Crusades until the Crusaders were swept away by the Ottoman Turks in the fourteenth century. In 1258 Genghis Khan and his Mongol forces swept through the Fertile Crescent (modern Iraq), destroying forever what was left of the Abbasid Caliphate. Within fifty years, however, the Mongols had become Islamized. In the early fourteenth century, Mongols from Central Asia under Timurlane invaded northern Eurasia (modern Azerbaijan, North India, Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq) as far as Damascus (where Ibn Khaldun met Timurlane ) before turning north to defeat the Ottomans in Anatolia. The Spanish
Reconquista
was in the process of driving out Muslim rule in Spain.
Ibn Khaldun concentrated on understanding the meaning of the history through which he had lived, focusing on the rise and fall of dynasties or states (
daula
). He concluded that the progress of history—the emergence of communities and the creation and decline of the dynastic state—hinged on group solidarity (
asabiyya
), culture (
umran
), and power. In his view, the social nature of man impelled him to form co-operative communities for survival. The form that the community took was conditioned by the specific circumstances of its material existence—the climate and material environment. Nomadic society based on kinship possessed the strongest characteristic of solidarity. By its nature nomadic life was non-territorial, frequently marginal, distinctly egalitarian, and precarious. The coming together of tribal solidarity and vitality with the prophetic impulse of Islam transformed nomadic solidarity into an inspired historic movement. The expansion of Arab tribal power led to a dynastically ruled complex community pursuing both nomadic and sedentary lifestyles. A dynastically ruled state, however, contained the seeds of its decay and destruction. The security of existence in settled communities, the comparative luxury, the segmented character of labour, and the conspicuous consumption of the élite led to a decline in resolute boldness and integrity, rising corruption, populations debilitated by desire and moral decline, and, most importantly to a loss of a sense of solidarity.
BAR 

 
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See
Averroës
.

 
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A distinction has been drawn by Brian Barry between ideal-regarding and want-regarding principles employed in political argument. A want-regarding principle takes into account all the wants persons happen to have. An ideal-regarding principle is selective about those wants: for example, it might aim to exclude consideration of those wants which persons have, the fulfilment of which would be inimical to their welfare. There are, of course, many different ‘ideals’ which would license such selectivity.
AR 

 
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(1) The doctrine that the external world must be understood through consciousness.
Plato
,
Kant
, and
Hegel
all opposed the empiricist claim that knowledge of the world could only be gained by experience. On the contrary, claimed Kant, experience could only be made sense of by drawing on categories of thought and the concepts of space and time, and these were prior to experience. By extension, particular forms of experience could be ordered and judgements made about them only in relation to something beyond themselves: for instance, moral experience in relation to an ideal of the good, and religious experience in relation to the ideal of God
(2) Loosely, any behaviour shaped by the pursuit of an unattainable objective such as equality or justice, or by a general principle such as public service.
(3) Specifically, from (2), in a generally pejorative sense of those liberals who had sought to bring an end to war after 1918 through the
League of Nations
and the principle of
collective security
. They were charged with having advocated a system of international relations that set order above justice, so favouring the dominant powers of the day against revisionist states such as Germany, Japan, or the Soviet Union, and with supposing that desire alone could end war in spite of supposedly immutable realities such as human nature, national interest, the security dilemma, or history. Those realists, such as E. H. Carr , who argued for a foreign policy based on practical acquiescence in the tendency of history drew heavily on Kantian transcendental idealism and the idea of universal history as developed by
Hegel
and
Marx
in order to oppose the popular or common-sense idealism of their day, and this has sometimes caused confusion.

CJ 

 
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