Ibn Khaldun as a Social Holist Philosopher

Abstract

This article explicates the salient features of Ibn Khaldun’s social holism. Ibn Khaldun is an Arab philosopher who is regarded as a proto-social holist theorist in modern social thought. The central thesis of social holism asserts that human beings are social creatures in the sense that they depend upon one another not only for their biological existence but also for the development of human cognitive potentials. Many European philosophers since the eighteenth century, including Giambattista Vico, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Gottfried Herder, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Ferdinand Tönnies contributed their roles to the development of social holism in the modern western tradition. Considerably, after Aristotle and before the European social holist theorists, Ibn Khaldun developed his notion of social holism in the fourteenth century in the Islamic tradition. The key argument of Ibn Khaldun’s social holism holds that cooperation is essential for human existence. He makes a distinction between the sedentary and the nomadic social groups. Ibn Khaldun claims that Asabiyyah is the central value of the nomadic society. The expression, ‘Asabiyyah’ refers to ‘social cohesiveness’ which binds people together. Certainly, Ibn Khaldun is an important philosopher because he is not only a bridge between classical and modern thought in Western tradition but also between Islamic and Western traditions. Thus, in this article, I demonstrate Ibn Khaldun as a significant social holist philosopher.