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medieval · 1332 to 1406
Six centuries before formal game theory, a Tunisian statesman-scholar built a working model of how ruling groups rise, decay, and fall, and used it to explain why the same story keeps repeating.
Facts reviewed 2026-07-11.
Ibn Khaldun lived the politics he later modeled. Born in Tunis in 1332 to a family of officials and scholars, he spent his career moving between courts across North Africa and Muslim Spain, serving rulers as secretary, envoy, and judge, and spending time in prison when patrons fell. Late in life, as a senior judge in Cairo, he was present at the siege of Damascus in 1401 and negotiated face to face with the conqueror Timur, an encounter both men treated as a meeting of practitioners.
In 1377 he withdrew to a castle in what is now Algeria and wrote the Muqaddimah, the introduction to a planned universal history. The introduction outgrew the history: it laid out what Ibn Khaldun called a new science of human social organization, an attempt to explain why states behave the way they do rather than simply record what they did.
The engine of his model is asabiyyah, usually translated as group feeling or social cohesion. A group with strong asabiyyah, typically forged in hardship at the periphery, can take power from a ruling group whose cohesion has decayed. But taking power starts the clock on the winner's own decay: settled rule brings luxury, luxury dissolves the shared hardship that produced cohesion, and within a few generations the dynasty is as soft as the one it replaced. Ibn Khaldun projected this cycle across roughly four generations, a scenario forecast with a mechanism, not just a narrative about decline.