IBN KHALDUN AND KARL MARX : ON SOCID‑

HISTORIC CHANGE

Fuad Baali & J. Brian Price

The relationship between history and sociology has long been subject to controversy. In this paper history is conceived of as a series of changing events and, in this sense, is social change. This theme has important implications for social theory. As C. Wright Mills argued, “the general problem of a theory of history cannot be separated from the general problem of a theory of social struc­ture.[1]“ However, history is still construed by some to be an idiographic discipline which differs from sociology, a homothetic discipline.[2] This tends to justify, with a few notable exceptions,[3] mutually exclusive scholarship within two separate disciplines.

An adequate solution to the dilemma of how to preserve sociology as a generalizing science, taking into account historical variations in society, is suggested in the work of Ibn Khaldūn (733-809/1332-1406) and Karl Marx.[4] In their writings we can find a dialectical synthesis between history and, what we now know as, sociology which incorporates the aspect of change. By dialectical we mean that their approach to the study of human social activity “grasps things and their images, ideas, essentially in their interconnection.”[5]-As Marx and Ibn Khaldūn proceed inductively in making socio-historic generalizations they avoid some of the limitations experienced by functionalism.[6] This unique conception of social science can be understood better if we sketch their work as to (I) the dialectical interpretation of the role of economic and non-economic factors in history; and (2) the nature of historical change. From their study of these phenomena Marx and Ibn Khaldūn provide us (1) with the rudiments of an empirical-dialectical methodology; (2) with the beginnings of a theory of society and the manner in which it changes ; and thus (3) with a unique conception of historical sociology.

Economic Interpretation of History. The best known and yet most often misunderstood aspect of Marx’s work is his economic interpretation of history. He is often labelled as an economic determinist, and, as such, having a closed system of thought. To clarify this we must engage in some textual criticism. Consider the following three commonly quoted passages from Marx. Each passage is divided into two parts ; the first (A) reflecting an emphasis on economic determinism, the latter (B) an emphasis on free-will activity of men as they make their history.

I (A) “The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organization of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.”

(B) “…The writings of history must always set out from’ these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of man.”[7]

II (A) “In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic struc­ture of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.”

(B) “The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life-process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being determines their consciousness.”[8]

III (A) “The production of ideas, of conceptions, or consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Con­ceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behavior.”

(B) “…Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc.--real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process.”[9]

In statement II (A), Marx especially appears as a strict economic determinist. Yet in II (B) he uses the word “conditions” and then in the next sentence “determines”. Each alters the causal direction implied. Even when Marx says that social being determines consciousness, social being is not made synonymous with economic existence. In the statements below we can see the sociological element in Marx’s thought:

“By social we understand the co-operation of several individuals, no matter under what conditions, in what manner and to what end. It follows from this that a certain mode of production, or industrial stage, is always combined with a certain mode of co-operation, or social stage, and their mode of co-operation is itself a `productive force’.”[10]

We have to juxtapose these opposing ideas of determinism and free will and see them in their dialectical relationship to one another. Joachim Israel sums up this crucial Marxian thesis as follows:

“Man is certainly a product of social, especially economic, conditions, but it is man himself who creates and changes these conditions. There exists a dialectic interplay, seen in a historical perspective, between man as active, self-creating subject, and man as an object of the conditions he creates.”[11]

Marx was not careful enough in his choice of words; at times his polemic carried him away from the dynamics of history he was trying to convey into what seemed to be a single-factor determinism. In a letter to Joseph Bloch, in 1890, Engels writes that:

“…According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase.”[12]

The use of political, juridical, religious, and other variables as explanatory ones is evident in historical monographs written by Marx such as the Eighteenth Brumaire and The Class Struggles in France. Merton has pointed out that if we convert Marx’s statement that religion is the “opiate of the people” into a state­ment of neutral fact, then we can see that “system of religion do affect behavior, that they are not merely epiphenomena but partially independent determinants of behavior.”[13] Similarly, when Marx says that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas,”[14] he is clearly recognising that ideas can rule. However, these ideas do arise from the economic interests of the ruling elite. There is no apparent contradiction in saying that ideational variables influence the course of history, even though they did arise from concrete material conditions. This issue goes back to the metaphysical roots of science with Aristotle’s exposition of material cause as an object of scientific inquiry, as distinguished from the Platonic theory of ideas. This is all Marx is doing when he observes:

“Once the ruling ideas have been separated from the ruling individuals and, above all, from the relationships which result from a given stage of the mode of production, and in this way the conclusion has been reached that history is always under the sway of ideas, it is very easy to abstract from these various ideas `the idea’ `die Idee,’ etc., as the dominant force in history, and thus to understand all these separate ideas and concepts as `forms of self-determination’ on the part of the concept develop­ing in history.’’[15]

In looking at statement IIl above this awareness on the part of Marx of the tendency for ideas to eventually develop an autonomy of their own in the face of change is communicated in his use of such terms as “at first” and “at this stage” when speaking of how conceptions appear to be directly related to the material activity of men. We agree then with the Needleman and Needle-man’s statement, with regard to Marx’s work, that, although “there is ultimate economic determinism, the theory is a multi-casual one.”[16]

Ibn Khaldūn also gave a predominant, though not exclusive, position to the economic factor in history. Heinrich Simon points out that “the intellectual activity of man, the arts and sciences, his moral attitudes and behaviour, the style of living and taste, standard of living and customs are, determined by the kind and degree of development of production.[17] We find evidence for this in Ibn Khaldūn’s Muqaddimah:

“It should be known that the differences of condition among people are the result of the different ways in which they make their living. Social organization enables them to co-operate toward that end and to start with the simple necessities of life, before they get to the conveniences and luxuries.

“... Those who live by agriculture or animal husbandry cannot avoid the call of the desert, because it alone offers the wide fields, acres, pastures for animals, and other things that the settl­ed areas do not offer. It is therefore necessary for them to restrict themselves to the desert. Their social organization and co-operation for the needs of life and civilization, such as food, shelter, and warmth, do not take them beyond the bare subsistence level, because of their inability (to provide) for anything beyond those (things). Subsequent improvement of their conditions and acquisition of more wealth and comfort than they need, cause them to rest and take it easy. Then, they co-operate for things beyond the (bare) necessities. They use more food and clothes, and take pride in them. They build large houses, and lay out towns and cities for protection. This is followed by an increase in comfort and ease, which leads to formation of the most developed luxury customs.... Here, now, (we have) the sedentary people. ‘Seden­tary people’ means the inhabitants of cities and countries, some of whom adopt the crafts as their way of making a living, while others adopt commerce. They earn more and live more comfort-ably than Bedouins, because they live on a level beyond the level of (bare) necessity, and their way of making a living corresponds to their wealth.”[18]

The badū, or bedouins, are the most primitive and tough people, while the hadar are the sedentary, or civilized people. The transition from desert to city life is one from badawa to hadara.

Although these economic exigencies are given such a prominent place in the Muqaddimah, non-economic factors are not excluded from exerting an influence on society. Ibn Khaldūn attached great importance to ‘asabīyah[19] as an historical force. In inter-dependence with other phenomena such as religion, royal authority (mulk), morals, science, and economic organisation itself, ‘asabīyah is a major independent variable in the development of human societies. In contrast to Simon, Ayad, and Issawi[20] who see economic materialism as the most important explanatory element in Ibn Khaldūn’s work, White views `asabīyah (group solidarity) as “at once the motive power of the historical process and the principle which, when discovered, explains the process.”[21] However, these two positions can be juxtaposed as we did with Marx in order to see the essentially dialectical relationship between social solidarity and changes in social structure. The effects of ‘asabīyah are numerous. For one, it is the basis of mulk, or royal authority, which is necessary for its restraining influence on man.[22] It is through group solidarity that the bedouin tribes are able to survive the harsh desert life.[23] When ‘asabīyah has declined in a dynasty, its downfall is all but inevitable: “The dynasty can be founded and established only with the help of group feeling. There must be a major group feeling uniting all the groups subordinate to it.’’[24] Religion is another important element in society; a dynasty based on religious law is more likely to have wide power and extensive royal authority as religion “does away with mutual jealousy and envy among people and causes concentration upon the truth. But religion cannot fully materialize without `asabiyah as every mass undertaking by necessity requires group feeling.[25]

‘Asabīyah is not unrelated to the economic structure of society. Rabie[26] considers it to be one of several phenomena whose characteristics and development are effects of the prevailing mode of living in a culture and of the transition from the more primi­tive bedouin culture[27] to the more civilised life of the sedentary peoples. But at the same time ‘asabiyah is the “vehicle or instrument of transition” of this change because of its unifying power over the desert tribes, giving them greater cohesion and strength over the decadent city-dwellers.[28] Even though religion and, more generally, group solidarity are essential elements of Ibn Khaldūn’s description of social organization, according to Rabie, socio-economic reasoning and materialistic interpretation of cultural events are two basic methodological assumptions of Ibn Khaldūn.[29] There is a dialectical interplay between economic and cultural elements of social solidarity:

“No abstract polarization of cause and effect can be found in his study of `asabīyah in the two environments. While primitive and vigorous `asabīyah, with all its pecularities, is an effect of the way of living under badawa, it acts in due time as the principal cause of changing this very way of living to a completely different one under hadara.”[30]

Ideational elements definitely have an autonomy in history as conceptualized by Ibn Khaldūn. Compare the following statement of his to Marx’s position on the place of “ruling ideas” in history: “The widely accepted reason for changes in institutions and customs is the fact that the customs of each race depend on the customs of its rulers. As the proverb says: `The common people follow the religion of the ruler.’ “[31] Although seeing the dialectical interplay between ideas and material substratum, both Ibn Khaldūn and Marx tended to emphasise the latter more. Some of the specific ways in which they dealt with economic variables, especially with the role of labour in social relations, are worth pursuing here. For example, Ibn Khaldūn regards labour as the foundation of human society and of all values and discusses profit as value realised from human labour. He also shows how a person earns and acquires capital in terms strikingly similar to the economists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.[32] To Ibn Khaldūn “men persist only with the help of property”. To take property away is an injustice which ruins civilisation; people have no incentive to co-operate with one another and thus live in apathy.[33] Marx’s views on labour are expressed poignantly in the following passage :

“Indeed, labour, life-activity, productive life itself, appears in the first place merely as a means of satisfying a need—the need to maintain physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It is life-engendering life. The whole character of a species—its species character—is contained in the character of its life-activity; and free, conscious activity is man’s species character.. Life itself appears only as a means to life. . . . The object of labour, is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he con-templates himself in a world that he created.”[34]

Despite this more philosophical emphasis placed on labour by Marx, there is no contradiction here with the views of Ibn Khaldūn on the same subject. They also both express disdain for forced labour[35] and monopolies.[36] The reasons for this are quite different though. Marx believes that man is estranged from labour in a system where private property dominates because the only true relationship to one’s work is in the form of communal labour.

To Ibn Khaldūn man can be estranged only if his incentive for gain is destroyed, because all men are self-seeking: “Every man tries to get things; in this all men are alike.”[37] There is no explicit concept of alienation, no depiction of the enslaving power of the market--he is describing the fourteenth-century beginnings of capitalism. But Marx also described man as beset by the “furies of private interest”.[38] Without the futuristic point of reference when communism brings “the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e. human) being”[39] ; Marx’s conceptual elements bear a remarkable similarity to Ibn Khaidūn’s.

The emphasis placed on economic variables,[40] notwithstand­ing’ the modifications necessitated with consideration of non-economic ones, tends to make Ibn Khaldūn and Marx seem more like determinists than as if they had placed equal emphasis on free-will elements. The role of the individual in history is a theme worth following up as it involves the question of the extent to which the individual is chained to or free from economic circumstances and historical inevitability. We have seen how, in the words of Schaff, “in the Marxist view, man is the maker of history not as a monad of utterly unconditioned free will, which belongs in the realm of philosophical phantasy, but as a product of history and so as a real, socially conditioned psychophysical individual who makes certain choices.”[41] Ibn Khaldūn, on the contrary, has been criticized for his “inability to come to grips with the individual human personality in history.”[42] He “regards individual efforts completely useless in this respect.”[43] Indeed, the Muqaddimah laboriously traces the rise and fall of a myriad dynasties and groups in history. By stressing the importance of ‘asabīyah or group solidarity in the change of one dynasty to another it appears as if Ibn Khaldūn does relegate the individual to a secondary place in historical development. Interpreting this in terms of the realism-nominalism distinction, Ibn Khaldūn would seem to be classified as a realist, in contradistinction to the apparent nominalism of Marx. This would place Ibn Khaldūn in Durkheim’s mode of sociology. However, both Ibn Khaldūn and Karl Marx achieved a synthesis of realism and nominalism which reflects the dynamic, dialectical character of their socio­logy. For Ibn Khaldūn, the impetus for change in society, although depending on `asabīyah (group solidarity) and the transi­tion from badawa (desert life) to hadara (urban life), rests also on a psychological-basis as the nomads yearn for what the civilized societies possess.[44] Similarly, in The Economic and Philoso­phic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx says: “Above all, we must avoid postulating ‘Society’ again as an abstraction vis a vis the individual. The individual is the social being.”[45] On closer examination Marx’s conception of the relationship between the individual and society appears to be a synthesis similar to that of Simmel:[46]

“Social activity and social mind exist by no means only in the form of some directly communal activity and directly communal mind, although communal activity and communal mind–i.e., activity and mind which are manifested and directly revealed in real association with other men—will occur wherever such a’ direct expression of sociability stems from the true character of the activity’s content and is adequate to its nature.”[47]

Marx seems to acknowledge the existence of a social mind, but is unsure of its place in capitalist society in which man is alienat­ed from the community by this social consciousness as an abstrac­tion, and not as a living community.[48]

A deeper understanding of these fluid relationships between social phenomena is possible when we grasp the dialectical nature of Ibn Khaldūn’s and Karl Marx’s approach to historical change in the following section.

Nature of Historical Change. In the preceding section we have seen, in the words of Roberto Michels, that Ibn Khaldūa “insisted on the essential thesis that differences in customs and institutions depend on the various ways in which man procures for himself the means of subsistence”.[49] Changes in history are in part the changes that take place in the transition from the badawa to the hadara mode of living. Similarly, Marx believed that “any change arising in the productive forces of men necessarily effects a change in their relations of production”.[50] The root of these changes in the productive base is conflict which is endemic to all societies. For Ibn Khaldūn this conflict often rests on a psycho-logical basis as the nomads dislike the urbanites for what they possess. Marx was not unware of this clash between agrarian and non-agrarian groups : “The greatest division of material and mental labor is the separation of town and country. The antagonism between town and country begins with the transition from barbarism to civilization, from tribe to state, from locality to nation, and runs through the whole history of civilization to the present day.”[51] He goes on to say that “the great uprisings of the Middle Ages all radiated from the country”.[52]

For Ibn Khaldūn and Karl Marx, however, there is a macro-level of socio-historic change which is fundamentally a dialectical movement from one stage to another. They only differ in that Marx sees the movement progressing toward communist society,[53] whereas Ibn Khaldūn sees a cyclical rise and fall of dynasties. To Ibn Khaldūn there are five stages of dynasties:

“The first stage is that of success, the overthrow of all opposition, and appropriation of royal authority from the preceding dynasty. In this stage, the ruler serves as model to his people by the manner in which he acquires glory, collects taxes, defends property, and provides military protection…

“The second stage is the one in which the ruler gains complete control over his people, claims royal authority all for himself, excluding them, and prevents them from trying to have a share in it…

“The third stage is one of leisure and tranquility in which the fruits of royal authority are enjoyed… acquisition of property, creation of lasting monuments, and fame… This stage is the last during which the ruler is in complete authority…

“The fourth stage is one of contentment and peacefulness... “The fifth stage is one of waste and squandering… [the ruler] ruins the foundation his ancestors had laid and tears down what they had built up. In this stage, the dynasty is seized by senility and the chronic disease from which it can hardly ever rid itself, for which it can find no cure, and, eventually, it is destroyed.”[54] In another section of the Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldūn compares the life spans of dynasties to that of individuals. These stages describe how the desert attitudes of toughness and savagery change in the second generation to humble subservience and luxury-mindedness under royal authority. In the third generation the period of desert life is forgotten, and as luxury reaches its peak, group feeling disappears. In the fourth generation ancestral prestige is destroyed, and the cycle begins again as other desert tribes over throw the corrupt society. [55]

“In this way the history of human society involves in an eternal cycle: Human society is in an eternal up and down movement, it develops and completes itself not into something higher and better, but into something different which comprises the old and the new at the same time. The dialectics that view the nature of the world as movement, but not as a purposeful development—opposite forces do not neutralize each other, the total movement is static—are characteristics of the time in which Ibn Khaldun composed his work.”[56] On the contrary, Marx conceives of society as passing through successive evolutionary stages: “In broad outlines we can designate the Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal, and the modern bourgeois modes of production as so many epochs in the progress of economic formation of society.”[57] The first stage is that of primitive communism and is discussed at length by Engels in his Origin of the Family. The second deals with slavery in ancient Greece and Rome, the third with medieval feudalism—lbn Khaldūn’s era. This is the period of the great clash between town and country. We are fortunate in having this description by Engels of the mass movements of the Middle Ages, in a footnote to his essay “On the History of Early Christianity”.

Islam is a religion adapted to Orientals, especially Arabs, i.e., on one hand to townsmen engaged in trade and industry, on the other to nomadic Bedouins. Therein lies, however, the embryo of a periodically recurring collision. The townsmen, grow rich, luxurious, and lax in the observation of the `law’. The Bedouins, poor and hence of strict morals, contemplate with envy and covetousness these riches and pleasures. Then they unite under a prophet, a Mandi, to chastise the apostates and restore the observation of the ritual and the true faith, and to appropriate in recompense the treasures of the renegades. In a hundred years they are naturally in the same position as the renegades were: a new purge of faith is required, a new Mandi arises, and the game starts again from the beginning… All these movements are clothed In religion, but they have their source in economic causes, and yet even when they are victorious they allow the old economic conditions to persist untouched. So the old situation remains unchanged and the collision recurs periodically.”[58]

Simon has observed that Engels’ statements are fully congruent with the theory which Ibn Khaldūn has set up, but “we do not know whether he knew the work of Ibn Khaldun”. The transla­tion of Ibn Khaldūn’s work which was published by the Institute of France in the 1860’s “could very well have been known to Marx and Engel's, who were doubtless interested in new scientific publications, especially those that dealt with social problems”.[59]

Ibn Khaldūn was standing on the threshold of capitalist society, and this has been expressed in his economic theory. Marx had the advantage of living at the apex of civilization when he could look in retrospect at the period in which Ibn Khaldūn lived. But on the one hand, the notion of evolution is not entirely absent from the Muqaddimah, as a general shift toward sedentary civilisation could be detected.

The limitation placed on Ibn Khaldūn’s study of history is, in the words of Toynbee, “the axiom that all historical thought is inevitably relative to the particular circumstances of the thinker’s own time and place”.[60] The same can be said of Marx when we observe the failure of many of his predictions to come true. But Marx’s work is evolutionary in another sense: history is the progressive transformation of human nature, with full human freedom its end.[61] Freedom “consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature which is founded on knowledge of natural necessity; it is therefore necessarily a product of historical development”,[62]

Aside from their outlook on historical evolution, Marx and Ibn Khaldūn both set forth a conception of historical change characterized by conflict and one which is dialectical in nature: each successive stage arises from the conflicting contradictions of the previous one. Although Ibn Khaldūn’s conception of change is the cyclical rise and fall of dynasties in contrast to the more evolutionary postulates of Marx, to both these men these changes in stages are essentially dialectical. Their statements are fully congruent with one another. Because of his appearance in the nineteenth century, Marx was confident to say that “the history of all hitherto existing society has been the history of the class struggle”.[63] lbn Khaldūn was more circumscribed in limiting his notion of conflict to one between the desert people and those in urban areas. Their dialectic does not rest on a reified metaphysical principle, but is rooted in actual historic relations. Historical materialism is a better term to use than dialectical materialism, but, as we have seen this term can also be misleading in the light of the dialectical relationship of productive and non-productive factors in history.[64] Confusion exists over this because when we abstract from particular historical events and posit the dialectic as a scientific methodology, it often seems as if it has been made into a hypostasized reality. We have to remember Marx’s admonition that “in direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven”,[65]

Conclusion

The dialectic which Ibn Khaldūn and Karl Marx saw operating in history is nothing more than an historical generalisation based on empirical observations. In his observation, especially of the Arab world, Ibn Khaldūn described the conflict between nomadic peoples and the more civilised sedentary peoples in the context of a continual change of power; in a cyclical rise and fall of dynasties. Four centuries later Marx observed the inner dynamic of different social classes ‘as they created systems which in turn became the source of their downfall. Marx looked at men “in their actual empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions”.[66] In addition to this both men rejected a narrow cause-and-effect determinism in the relation-ship between the material and ideational elements in history in favour of a dialectical sociology. For these reasons they provided the foundations long ago for an empirical-dialectical methodology which has not been developed into its fullest possibilities in sociology.

In addition to methodology Ibn Khaldūn and Karl Marx have provided us with the beginnings of it theory of society and the manner in which it changes. In the Grundrises der Kritic derpoli tischen Okonotnie[67] Marx indicates a central theme of his work. He proposes to study the “abstract characteristics of society, taking into account their historical aspects”. At the highest level of generality of scientific theory, that of general ideas about the structure of theory and the nature of causality, this historical sociology has many advantages. The fact that many of his predictions failed to come true bolster rather than detract from this definition. That is, had Marx lived on into the twentieth century he would have had to take note of historical changes taking place which would modify his theory of society, recognising that theoretical propositions are open to later refinement or alternation. A refutation at the level of prediction does not mean a refutation of Marx’s theory up to the highest level of generality. Stinchcombe[68] notes that there are different levels of critique correspond­ing to the different levels of generality and each must be considered separately. Marx’s work has not been emphasized enough by American sociologists partly because some of his predictions failed to come true, giving rise to the belief that his work was unscientific or ideological. But as Bottomore points out, “the general inclination of Marx’s work, when it is traced from his earlier to his later writings, is clearly away from the philosophy of history and towards a scientific theory of society, in the precise sense of a body of general laws and detailed empirical statements”.[69]

After defining history as “information about human social organisation,” Ibn Khaldūn goes on to say that “discussion of the general conditions of regions, races, and periods constitutes the historian’s foundation”.[70] This clearly refers to the generalizing aspect of science. As Nour concludes:

“All together, it is a credit to Ibn Khaldun that he tried to study society in all its phases, perceiving the universal processes behind the particular events and seeking generalizations fitting societies of different times and places. If we conceive sociology as the effort to generalize from observed facts on the behavior of men in society, with a view to more accurate and more complete comprehension of the associative life of man, both in its static and dynamic aspects, then we are justified in speaking of lbn Khaldun as a sociologist”.[71]

Another student of his work, Schmidt, points out that “when Ibn Khaldūn speaks of science (`ilm), he does not mean knowledge in .the rough, but that certain and systematized knowledge which to us is science—not Wissen, but Wissenschaft”.[72]

Thus, in the work of Karl Marx and lbn Khaldūn there is no real bifurcation or in congruency of theory and method which is the basis of difficulties and the object of concern to many today.

NOTES