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Thesis Ibn Khaldun’s question, what keeps power alive, matters more than Locke’s question of what justifies it

Youssef Benali Fellow
· 6 replies · 284 views
Power & the stateIslamicLatin AmericanModern EuropeanIbn KhaldunJohn LockeThomas Hobbes#asabiyyah#legitimacy#political-cohesion#state-formation
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Where it stands

I teach history in Fes, and the more history I teach the more I think political philosophy often asks the second question first.

Locke asks what makes authority legitimate: consent, limited government, a right of revolution when trust is broken. Ibn Khaldun asks something different in the Muqaddimah: what makes a group able to take power and keep it? His answer is asabiyyah, group feeling, the solidarity that lets people act as one. It is strongest among people who share hardship and kinship, it wins power, and then prosperity dissolves it. He says that a dynasty, as a rule, does not last beyond three generations, roughly a hundred and twenty years.

My thesis: a theory of legitimacy that ignores cohesion is a theory for states that will not exist. A perfectly justified constitution, consented to by everyone, will collapse if nobody feels bound to anybody else. Morocco's own history, with dynasties rising from the mountains and the desert and softening in the cities, reads like a commentary on the Muqaddimah.

So I claim priority for Ibn Khaldun's question. Not that legitimacy doesn't matter, but that you must answer "what holds us together?" before "what makes this rightful?" can even arise.

Tell me why I'm wrong.

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6 replies

For the thesis 3

  1. Javier Morales

    For Fellow

    For, partly. Hobbes is the European who asks both questions together. Chapter 29 of Leviathan is a list of things that weaken a commonwealth or lead to its dissolution, the "diseases" of the state. He thought a theory of authority was useless if it could not also explain why authority fails. So Youssef's priority claim has a precedent: the most systematic of the contract theorists was also obsessed with cohesion.

    Helpful · 3
  2. Mateo Quispe

    For Fellow

    For. Mariátegui's Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (1928) argued that the Peruvian republic was a legal shell over a society that had never been made into a nation, because the indigenous majority was excluded from land and citizenship. He said the problem of the Indian was the problem of land. The constitution was liberal; the cohesion was absent; the state stayed fragile. That's Youssef's point in an Andean key.

  3. Zainab Kadhim

    For Contributor

    For, with a reminder. Ibn Khaldun also says that religion can multiply group feeling, joining people beyond kinship, and that a religious call can make a group far stronger than blood alone would. So he did not think cohesion was only about tribe or enemy. Sana's worry is real, but the Muqaddimah already contains a kind of cohesion based on shared conviction, which is close to what a theory of legitimacy hopes to create.

    Helpful · 3

Against the thesis 2

  1. Johanna Reinhardt

    Against Fellow

    Against. You're comparing a descriptive question with a normative one and then ranking them, which seems a category mistake. Knowing what keeps power alive tells you nothing about whether it should be kept alive. The Mongols had extraordinary group feeling. That doesn't tell you whether their rule was rightful. If anything, a regime with strong cohesion and no legitimacy is the most dangerous kind there is.

    Helpful · 2
    1. Youssef Benali

      Fellow

      Johanna, you're right that I put it too strongly. Let me revise: the priority I mean is in the order of inquiry, not in value. You cannot evaluate a political order until you understand what it can and cannot sustain. A normative theory that requires a kind of cohesion no society has is not wrong, exactly, but it is idle.

      Helpful · 1
  2. Sana Mir

    Against Fellow

    Against. As a journalist I've seen where group feeling comes from in practice: very often from naming an enemy. Cohesion gets manufactured through exclusion, and the people outside the group pay for it. Ibn Khaldun describes asabiyyah with admiration and a historian's detachment; the people on the wrong side of it can't afford the detachment. That's exactly why legitimacy has to come first: it is the only standard that asks what the cohesion is being used for.

    Helpful · 2