The Muqaddimah

⚖The case for it

The first philosophy of history and arguably the founding text of sociology, written in 1377 by a North African polymath. Ibn Khaldun's theory of asabiyyah (group cohesion) explains the rise and fall of civilizations with a clarity that anticipates Toynbee, Weber, and Turchin. Empires don't fall from external enemies; they rot from within when solidarity dissolves. Sound familiar?

— the canon

✕The case against

Asabiyyah occupies a fraction of an enormous medieval encyclopedia; the rest covers Quranic sciences, dream interpretation, sorcery, and a climate theory of human character that assigns temperaments by latitude, with ugly results. Most editions abridge heavily, for good reason. The famous theory of dynastic decay is here, surrounded by several hundred pages of fourteenth-century scholarship you must mine through.

— the honest librarian