Ibn Khaldun and the Muqaddimah

1377 CE — Africa, North Africa

Today: Tunisia and Egypt (written near modern Frenda, Algeria)

A Tunisian official, sick of politics, retreated to a castle in the Algerian hills and wrote an introduction to a history of the world that turned into something else: an attempt to explain why dynasties rise and fall at all. His answer was asabiyyah — group solidarity. Hard peoples from the margins have it, conquer soft cities, grow comfortable over about four generations, lose it, and are conquered by the next hard people. He argued history should be examined for underlying causes rather than recited as a list of kings, and criticized earlier historians for repeating what they were told.

Worth knowing: Ibn Khaldun wrote that a historian's job is to test reports against what is plausible given how societies actually work — and that most historians fail because they lack the knowledge to know when a story is impossible. He was making this argument four centuries before Europe took up the same idea.

Pattern: Institutional sclerosis — Rules and bodies outlive their function; rent-seeking and complexity rise while returns on added complexity fall.

Entry 142 of 240 in Precedent, a walk through the whole human story in order.