History · a Light

He invented a science of society in five months

Ibn Khaldun, out of political favour and living in a castle in what is now Algeria, wrote the first draft of the Muqaddimah in 1377. He says it took him about five months. It was meant as the introduction to a history of the Arabs and Berbers, but it turned into something else: an argument that history should be tested like any other report, that a chronicle full of impossible numbers should be rejected on the grounds of what economies and armies can actually sustain, and that dynasties rise and fall by a pattern in group solidarity that he called asabiyya. He gave the subject a name, the science of human social organisation. Sociologists and economists still read it.

Ibn Khaldun · Qal'at Ibn Salama, 1377 CE