Ibn Khaldun – Assessing His Influence in the Foundation of Modern European Sociologies

In the course of recent debates around decentering, decolonializing and pluralizing the history of our discipline, Ibn Khaldun has been (re-)claimed not as a precursor, but as one of the “founding fathers” of sociology. Suspicion has been voiced that Ibn Khaldun’s heritage, especially his Muqaddima as an important reference in the foundational phase of modern European sociology, has been sidelined with the construction of the sociological canon and thus remains today an unacknowledged source. This paper systematically assesses the presence of Ibn Khaldun as a reference in early sociology texts. Starting from a representative corpus of German-language sociological monographies published between 1900 and 1934 (bibliography provided in Käsler, 1984), this study reconstructs the circulation of Ibn Khaldun’s works within the German-language and wider European community of scholars. While the overall presence of Ibn Khaldun is quantitatively rather low, it is indeed qualitatively interesting. A preliminary analysis hints to three potential “entry points” into modern sociology: Spanish history of ideas that refers to Ibn Khaldun’s heritage; debates between organicists and historical sociologists at the Institut International de Sociologie; as well as Vienna as a place of debate around Ibn Khaldun, possibly through the influence of Ottoman social thinkers. The paper then provides more detailed textual analysis of the reception of the Muqaddima by two important early sociologists, L. Gumplowicz and F. Oppenheimer, with regard to their “sociological theory of the state”. The way in which they mobilise Ibn Khaldun as a reference is particularly interesting with regard to the question in how far sociological theory is context-bound as opposed to generally true.