Can a society explain its own changes?

The people behind a ruler

Imagine several households agreeing to guard a dangerous road. They share supplies, keep watch and come to one another’s aid, and a successful organizer becomes their leader. Years later, travelers see his guards collecting tolls and assume that his commands alone hold everything together.

What has that account left out? The leader may owe his position to people whose cooperation made it possible, and if he starts excluding them from decisions, the arrangements that support his power may change. That raises a question about political explanation: how can the way power is established help explain what happens to it later?

History as a question about causes

Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) was born in Tunis and worked among the courts and political communities of North Africa and Muslim Spain before settling in Egypt. His Muqaddimah, an introduction to his historical work, investigates the conditions of social life, and Abderrahmane Lakhsassi’s account connects that inquiry with Ibn Khaldun’s own experience of rulers, rivalries and tribal communities. [2]

The previous lesson distinguished a community’s commitments from evidence about its conduct. Here the question shifts to what makes a political order possible and what changes it, and we move back in time, from Kabir and Nanak to a fourteenth-century inquiry.

What solidarity makes possible

Asabiyya is often rendered as group solidarity; Franz Rosenthal translates it as “group feeling.” It involves a readiness to defend and support one another, even at the risk of one’s life. Ibn Khaldun gives kinship an important place, but he also includes allies and clients, followers bound to a protector: close relations can create obligations like those of kinship. A remote pedigree has little force once it no longer sustains such relations. [1]

What counts is what people will actually do for one another. A name shared on paper provides no defenders when someone is attacked, while solidarity can let a group press claims that its members could not enforce alone. The same cooperation may protect insiders while helping them dominate others, and explaining it does not make their conduct just.

From leadership to the power to compel

In chapter II, section 16, Ibn Khaldun distinguishes a chief who is obeyed from a ruler who can force compliance. Only the ruler has mulk, royal authority, so an argument about how someone becomes respected is not yet an account of how anyone acquires the power to compel. [1]

We can reconstruct the central connection in three steps. Mutual support gives a group the strength to defend itself and to fight. A stronger coalition can then subordinate other groups and draw on their support. Finally, its leader can use this combined power to establish rule. Personal ambition matters, but ambition without supporters cannot do the same work.

The outcome is not fixed, though. A rising group may displace a weakened dynasty, that is, a succession of rulers from one house; an existing dynasty may instead recruit the group into its service; or obstacles may stop its advance. Ibn Khaldun names these circumstances even while presenting royal authority as solidarity’s natural goal. [1]

Success changes the relationship

In chapter III, section 10, the ruler who has won power seeks to keep authority for himself. The companions whose support helped him rise now have claims he wants to restrict, and concentrating power can curb their aspirations and shrink their share in governing. The people who helped win power can come to look like rivals to the person who holds it. [1]

Here, then, is a mechanism of change: a relationship creates political strength, and success then gives the leader reasons to alter that relationship. That explains more than a bare sequence such as “first cooperation, then exclusion.” It lets us ask how exclusion changes people’s willingness to help, and whether the evidence shows that change taking place.

Beginning and maintaining are different problems

In chapter III, sections 1–2, Ibn Khaldun warns against judging a dynasty’s origins by how settled it looks later. People may grow accustomed to obeying one ruling family, and rulers may come to rely on clients or other groups after their original solidarity has weakened. Habits of obedience and new sources of support can change how authority is kept. [1]

It would be a mistake to conclude that the original coalition was unnecessary because its descendants no longer play the same role, and equally a mistake to assume that the coalition alone explains every later change. An explanation needs a time and a question: are we explaining the conquest, continued obedience or the eventual loss of power?

How far does the explanation reach?

Ibn Khaldun often states his claims as necessities of social life, yet his account also keeps a place for divine action. Identifying social causes does not mean he has set religion aside, and Lakhsassi emphasizes this continuing religious setting. We should neither quietly shrink Ibn Khaldun’s ambitions nor mistake them for conclusions already proved. [2]

As lesson 31 showed, a connection observed in experience and a connection that must hold are different claims. To assess this historical account, we would need evidence about actual loyalties, recruitment and decisions, including cases that resist the proposed pattern. Solidarity itself has to be identified through evidence of mutual help; to call a group united merely because it won would be to argue in a circle. And as lesson 2 explained, support can be defeasible: further evidence can weaken it even when the original observations remain true.

A bounded explanation might show how one ruler’s exclusion of former allies weakened one government. It would not establish that every society must follow the same course, or that solidarity alone decides every political outcome.

Try a council report

Return to the road-guard community. Its council discovers that the leader dismissed his old companions before several households stopped supplying guards, and its report concludes: “Excluding allies weakened cooperation. This proves every government collapses once one person controls it.”

Which claim might further evidence support? What else would you need to know, and why does the final sentence go beyond the case? This exercise is optional.

Read a possible response

Only the first claim is one that further evidence could support: the excluded companions may have withdrawn their help, leaving fewer guards. To show it, we would need evidence that exclusion actually changed their willingness to help, since a failed harvest might instead have made supplies and time scarce, or both factors may have mattered; the order of events alone does not settle which. The final sentence leaps from one community to every government. Even strong evidence for the local explanation would give us a connection worth investigating elsewhere; it could not guarantee a universal collapse.

Carry this forward

Ask what holds a group together, what changes those relations and what evidence separates an explanation from a compelling story. The next lesson, Destiny, character and interpretation in Yoruba thought, turns from a community’s fortunes to a person’s: how does an account of someone’s future bear on effort and responsibility?

Sources and limits

[1] Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, English web transcription attributed to Franz Rosenthal by its title page, Islamic Philosophy Online, accessed 17 September 2026, for the argument about solidarity and royal authority. The complete main text of these sections was read:

• Chapter II: section 8 on kinship and comparable ties, and section 16 on solidarity and royal authority.
• Chapter III: section 1 on acquiring power, section 2 on established rule, and section 10 on exclusive authority, luxury and rest.

Chapter and section numbers identify units of the source, not course lessons. The historical examples in these sections were read as Ibn Khaldun’s claims, without independent verification of those events. Linked footnotes, the complete work, Arabic witnesses and a print scan were not checked. The web text has occasional spacing and transliteration defects, and no claim of print-page verification is made.

[2] Abderrahmane Lakhsassi, “Ibn Khaldūn”, chapter 25 in History of Islamic Philosophy, edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Oliver Leaman, Routledge, first published 1996, for biographical context and an interpretation of how political experience, social explanation and divine will relate. The consulted electronic edition carries the 2001 paperback and later reprint notices.

The complete “Life and Work” and “Philosophy of history and social theory” sections were read. The chapter’s wider philosophical comparisons and the works it cites were not independently investigated. No whole chapter or book was read; the chapter link identifies the publication and may require access.

The road-guard community, reconstruction, council report and explanatory response are original teaching material. No independent specialist review, learner testing or measured reading time is claimed. Understanding the account requires neither accepting its historical generalizations nor sharing its religious commitments.