Word: khaldun
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...seasons of human life, for example. Animals, people, have birth, growth, periods of vigor, then decline and death. Do societies obey that pattern? The idea of decadence, of course, implies exactly that. But it seems a risky metaphor. Historians like Arnold Toynbee, like the 14th century Berber Ibn-Khaldun and the 18th century Italian Giovanni Battista Vico, have constructed cyclical theories of civilizations that rise up in vigor, flourish, mature and then fall into decadence. Such theories may sometimes be too deterministic; they might well have failed, for example, to predict such a leap of civilization as the Renaissance. Ultimately...
...much on time and place, the deepest patterns of a society. Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler constructed cyclical, organic theories of history. All civilizations, they said, passed through similar stages of growth and decay and eventually perished, whether from internal or external wounds. The 14th century Berber historian Ibn-Khaldun prefigured the idea by concluding that history repeatedly moves through the same cycles. According to Ibn-Khaldun's theory, a youthful, growing society is animated by asabiyya, the spirit of social solidarity found in what he called "the desert aristocracy." But as the society becomes more "civilized," the cohesive group...
...Khaldun, and later, like-minded prophets, did not calculate that the cycles could be broken, that history could simply veer off in another direction. As Journalist-Critic A.J. Liebling noted, Ibn-Khaldun's determinism was refuted by "the vigor of Renaissance thought, the technological advances and the discovery of the New World...