PERSON
Ibn Khaldun
The fourteenth-century North African historian who founded sociology by insisting that human society follows discoverable laws—and whose central concepts of asabiyyah, the dynastic cycle, and civilisational softening are now the most precise analytical instruments available for understanding what AI is doing to the bonds that hold societies together.
Six centuries ago, a scholar who had served and watched several governments collapse sat down in an Algerian castle and tried to do something no one had quite done before: explain why societies behave the way they do, not as the will of
God or the deeds of great men, but as a system with laws as regular and discoverable as the laws of physics. The result was the
Muqaddimah (1377), the founding document of what we would now call sociology, and it is one of the strangest and most modern books ever written by a medieval mind. Ibn Khaldun invented the idea that human social organisation is an object of science—that beneath the bewildering particularity of events lies a discoverable structure, that civilisations rise and fall by mechanisms that can be named and, in principle, anticipated. We now live inside the most ambitious attempt in history