İsmail Hakkı İzmirli (1932), Philosophical Currents in Islam: Ibn Khaldun (732-808)

A leading intellectual of the late-Ottoman and early-Turkish Republican period, İsmail Hakkı İzmirli taught philosophy, theology, and law in İstanbul, and was a prolific writer, with more than forty-five published and unpublished books, and many articles. The article reproduced here in translation, which was part of a series of articles on leading Muslim thinkers, is on the life and work of Ibn Khaldun, in which the author both briefly introduces his major books (al-‘Ibar, al-Muqaddima, and al-Ta'rif in particular) and outlines his methodological principles and main arguments in the Muqaddima. İzmirli treats Ibn Khaldun as a philosopher and historian, admiring his philosophical views and methodological perspective as quite original and in many ways trailblazing, though he also criticizes him for unnecessarily “delving into useless issues such as Sufism.” Finally, he frequently compares him with both Muslim and Western intellectuals, e.g. Ibn Rushd, Ibn Miskawayh, al-Farabi, Ibn Bâjja, Niẓām al-Mulk, and Edward Gibbon, Marx, Spencer, and Comte, often finding Ibn Khaldun as a pioneer anticipating the ideas of later thinkers. He devotes a separate section to compare him with Machiavelli, emphasizing differences as well as similarities between the two, and likening the latter to a “disciple” of Ibn Khaldun's, claiming that “Machiavelli followed his mentor's path in his The Prince.”     

Khaldunian studies today: The contributions of Syed Farid Alatas

The growing interest in the 14^th-century Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun's ideas and his essentially historical-sociological perspective implies a promise of a critical appraisal of the Eurocentric nature of the classical and contemporary social theory. An important role is played in this endeavor by Syed Farid Alatas whose work has been important not only in terms of further introducing Ibn Khaldun's theory to the Western audience but also making it more relevant to the contemporary theoretical debates and historical sociology. This article reviews Alatas' work on Ibn Khaldun with a view to demonstrate that his contributions to the Khaldunian studies today take at least five different forms: a critical examination of Ibn Khaldun's theory in general, and reconstruction of it as a theory of the state, and of religious revival in particular; demonstrating its significance for the modern social sciences; its application to a number of premodern and modern empirical cases; and a theoretical integration of his model with some modern Western theories, which is a rare occurrence in both Khaldunian studies and sociology in general.     

José Ortega y Gasset (1934), Ibn Khaldūn Reveals the Secret to Us (thoughts on Africa Minor) translated from Spanish by Cynthia Scheopner

José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) was puzzled how Melilla remained a Spanish enclave on the North African coast. By 1927, Spain had solidified its hold on Northern Morocco and several books on the history and culture of “Africa minor” had been published; in one Ortega encountered Ibn Khaldūn. Ortega read the Prolegomena to History in the French translation by William MacGuckin de Slane. He found a key to understanding Spain that he explored in this essay, first published in El Espectador journal of Madrid in 1934. It introduced Ibn Khaldun to European audiences as the first philosopher of history three decades before an English translation of his work. Ortega, then, knew of Ibn Khaldun's theory of generations at the time he was developing his own. Ortega noted page numbers in parentheses in the text where he quoted from De Slane. The end notes are from the text as well, documenting Ortega's secondary sources for his impressions of Ibn Khaldūn, Islam, and North African culture.     

Reading Ibn Khaldun in the Formative Period of Sociology

‘Abd al-Rahman Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), the founder of the science of society, became known to modern sociologists during the formative period of sociology, that is, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. There was something of a reception of Ibn Khaldun in Europe at that time by sociologists and other scholars who were not necessarily involved with Islamic or West Asian studies. In fact, the reception of Ibn Khaldun by modern scholars in the West can be differentiated into Eurocentric or Orientalist as opposed to more disciplinary attitudes. While much has been said about the Eurocentric reception of Ibn Khaldun, less is discussed about the disciplinary approach to Ibn Khaldun among thinkers who wrote when the modern science of sociology was emerging in Europe. This special issue on Ibn Khaldun in the Formative Period of Sociology provides English translations of six articles originally written in Italian, French, German, Polish, Spanish and Turkish between 1896 and 1934. Not all of these articles were written by sociologists. Together, they provide some background as to how Ibn Khaldun was conceived of in non-area studies circles, in the social sciences and humanities.     

Ludwik Gumplowicz (1897–1898), Ibn Khaldun: An Arab Sociologist of the 14th Century

Ludwik Gumplowicz (1838–1909) was one of the key figures of the early period of sociology. Polish Jew, born in Krakow, he was Professor of Public Law at the University of Graz. His theory focused on intergroup conflict, but also on the origins and functioning of the state. His 1897–1898 contribution Ibn Khaldun: An Arab Sociologist of the 14th Century is a highly original attempt to use Ibn Khaldun's philosophy of history to defend his own sociological concepts, including the role of group dynamics and the significance of political and cultural factors in the constitution of communities. Gumplowicz argues for the relevance of Ibn Khaldun's ideas for the world of late nineteenth century, with its hectic academic debates and its troubled politics.     

A 14th Century Critique of Greek Philosophy: The Case of Ibn Khaldun

This article discusses the critique of Greek philosophy by a Muslim scholar of the middle age Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406 CE). It begins with a brief introductory background of Ibn Khaldun, followed by a trace of the elements of Greek philosophy in his writings. The main purpose is to track the line of argument Ibn Khaldun used in his criticism and the basic premises he used in his attempt to position himself in his critiques. This article ends with concluding remarks on Ibn Khaldun's real attitude and how he drew a balance between rejection of certain philosophic notions and the acceptance of reasons and logics as crafts practiced in human civilization.     

Guest Editor's Introduction

Classical social theory in the Western tradition concerned itself with the history of the human condition and sought answers to big questions such as the meaning of change and progress. They were interested in the nature, origins and consequences for human life of modern society, with its new means of organizing production as well as legal and political arrangements. Contrary to the optimism of the Enlightenment with its unbounded faith in the ability of reason and scientific inquiry to liberate humans from domination by both religion and nature, classical social theorists saw the negative side of modern civilization. This can be summarized in terms of the loss of freedom or the enslavement of humans, which each theorist understood as taking different forms. For Marx it was alienation, for Weber confinement in the iron-cage of rationality, and for Durkheim anomie. Although Ibn Khaldun lived centuries before the rise of classical social theory and was by no means a product of the modern world, it is possible to read his work as thematising the absence of freedom or enslavement as well. Bringing out this aspect of Ibn Khaldun shows, to some extent, the modern relevance of his thought. This article elaborates on Ibn Khaldun's theme of enslavement via his discussion on luxury and senility. It is the enslavement of sedentary people to luxury that explains the loss of group feeling or ‘asabiyyah, setting in motion a chain of developments that results in the senility of the dynasty and its eventual demise. In the first section I discuss the Enlightenment promise of freedom. The section that follows discusses classical social theory's critique of modernity or what amounts to a loss of faith in the Enlightenment project. Here the thought of Marx, Weber and Durkheim are presented as examples of Western assessments of the problem of the human condition in modernity. I then turn in the next two sections to Ibn Khaldun, discussing his theory of the rise and decline of states in terms of the role played by luxury.     

René Maunier (1915), Les idées sociologiques d’un philosophe arabe/The sociological ideas of an Arab philosopher in the 14th century

René Maunier (1887-1951) is usually considered to be the “founder” of “colonial sociology” in France. Much closer to the anthropologist Marcel Mauss than to the latter's uncle, Emile Durkheim, Maunier's academic career was largely connected to Arab countries like Egypt, and Algeria in particular, where he would teach for more than twenty years. Maunier's inclusion of Ibn Khaldûn into the history of sociology needs to be understood in line with the fact that at the time this article was published, the young Egyptian student Taha Hussein was beginning a thesis in France under the joint supervision of Durkheim and of the orientalist Paul Casanova. Defended in January 1918, three months after Durkheim's death, it was entitled Etude analytique et critique de la philosophie sociale d'Ibn Khaldoun (Analytic and critical study of Ibn Khaldoun's social philosophy).     

Ibn Khaldun and Philosophy: Causality in History

Ibn Khaldun was a statesman, diplomat, scholar and judge. His masterpiece Muqaddimah bears testimony to his skills in some other fields like economy and poetry too. As an intellectual of his time, he was naturally interested in philosophy as well. He had an education in philosophy and had a considerable knowledge in both Greek and Islamic philosophy. In fact, he is considered a philosopher of history and even the first one. This article will display an aspect of Ibn Khaldun's interest and relation to philosophy. It will discuss his conception of causation and analyze how it works in his history.     

Herbert Blumer and the Study of Fashion: A Reminiscence and A Critique

Recounting my late 1940s graduate student contacts with Herbert Blumer on the topic of fashion, 1 go on to assess his important contribution to the sociological study of fashion. Conceptually rich, the corpus of Blumer's writing on fashion is yet surprisingly small. His major opus on fashion, anticipated only in part by several of his earlier, less exhaustive writings on the subject, did not see print until 1969 with the publication of the justly famous Sociological Quarterly piece “Fashion: From Class Differentiation to Collective Selection.” There Blumer pursues two aims: (1) to challenge the then prevalent functionalist view of fashion as a “trickle down” symbolic mechanism for effecting social class differentiation, a view associated with such sociological eminences as Simmel and Veblen, and (2) to offer in its place his own quite original approach to fashion as a massive “collective selection” process wherein choices are guided more by the elusive lure of modernity than by invidious class tinctions as such. Prominent among the strengths of Blumer's position is the demonstrably greater empirical validity of “collective selection” as compared to “class differentiation.” Among its shortcomings are Blumer's slighting of a salient social psychological theme in Simmers dialectical approach to fashion and, more important, his failure to address in any sustained way the role of the fashion industry in the fashion process. The recently emerging, symbolic interactionist concept of social world offers a means for redressing this omission and for advancing further upon the ground opened by Herbert Blumer's still exciting breakthrough in the sociology of fashion.     

Guglielmo Ferrero (1896), Ibn Kaldoun: an Arab Sociologist of the Fourteenth Century

Ferrero introduces the life of ibn Khaldun and his Prolegomena to History, relying on William Mac Guckin de Slane's French translation of the work. Ferrero is one of the first Europeans to define ibn Khaldun as a sociologist and an original theorist of the concept of civilization as a sociological category. Ferrero's attention to the Khaldunian notion of the “spirit of the body” helps us understand what drives conflict and social change when nomadic and barbarous tribes come into contact with civilized peoples. Ferrero admired and saw contemporary value in ibn Khaldun's analysis of the mechanism behind the rise and fall of empires. Nations and groups are motivated by the zeal to obtain and protect their luxuries; heavy taxation to maintain the wealthy classes lays the ground for corruption and discontent, making societies vulnerable to invasion and control from an outside group, thus regenerating the cycle of civilizational history again.     

Tamito Yoshida: An Unknown Master of Japanese Sociology

This paper outlines the life and academic accomplishments of the largely internationally unknown but foremost innovative and leading sociologist of Japan considered as the “unknown master” of Japanese sociology, Tamito Yoshida. (i) Emphasizing originality and creativity, Yoshida's success was free from the existing sociological frameworks and he liberated theoretical study from the yoke of historical perspectives that had long governed Japanese theoretical sociology. (ii) Yoshida's uniform scientific approach that used the keywords of information, selection, and variation based on evolutionist ideas was consistent throughout his life from proposing the “design of information science” in his mid‐thirties to proposing the concept of “program sciences” in his later years. (iii) One of Yoshida's major sociological contributions was in identifying the close relationship between subjectivity and the structure of possession. (iv) Yoshida's “A Historical Perspective on the Forces and Relations of Production” is an original and critical re‐creation of the Marxist possession theory located within his own theoretical framework, and is an excellent critique of the central arguments of Marxism. It successfully illustrates Yoshida's superlative critical and creative skills of theoretical dialogue.     

Marx and the Method of Successive Approximations*

Karl Marx's sociology has been interpreted incorrectly as the consequence of the application of a “dialectical” method to social phenomenon. In this paper, I discuss his actual method of theory construction (a rather more complicated phenomenon than the simple reversal of the Hegelian dialectic), the Ricardian method of successive approximations. This method involves three steps or stages-observation, model formation, and model testing and revision. Marx's Capital is reviewed in the light of his use of this method.     

Nikolai Gogol'’s Self-Fashioning in the 1830s: The Postcolonial Perspective

This study examines Gogol'’s complex self-fashioning during the time of the creation and reception of his Ukrainian tales Vechera na khutore bliz Dikan'ki [Evenings on a Farm near Dikan'ka] (1831–1832) in light of the postcolonial concept of mimicry. Gogol'’s self-fashioning is studied through his submission to the symbolic power responsible for branding him as the Other in imperial Russian culture, as well as through his deliberate strategy of mimicry. Not only did Gogol'’s marginal social status and his Ukrainian ethnicity create a social hierarchy responsible for fashioning him as “an outsider within” imperial culture, Gogol' himself engaged in the colonial mimicry, trying to reverse the colonial gaze that imagined him as a “sly” Ukrainian. Challenging the accepted view of Gogol' as one who internalized the colonial stereotype of a “sly” Ukrainian, this study treats Gogol'’s identity as strategic, positional, and ambivalent. The first part of the study focuses on the manipulation of stereotypes of the Other within the Russian nationalist imagination in the early 1830s; the second part examines Gogol'’s ambivalent visual self-representation and social performance that simultaneously mimicked and menaced the colonial authority.     

Poetry of the Swamp: Blok’s “Folks” Cycle Bubbles of the Earth

Gogol'’s “A Few Words about Pushkin” has traditionally been viewed as evidence that Gogol' idolized Pushkin as a national poet par excellence. This article argues that behind Gogol'’s deference for Russia’s greatest poet lie layers of polemic and subversive iconoclasm. Though he initially proclaims Pushkin Russia’s national poet, Gogol' goes on to use his trademark rhetorical tools to effectively strip the poet of the honour. In doing so, he attempts to influence the reception of his own writings, which at the time predominantly concerned Ukrainian themes, in ways that would encourage his Russian audience to consider him—and not Pushkin—as Russia’s premier national writer. Countering Pushkin’s Russocentric model of national culture, Gogol' champions instead a centrifugal conception of national-imperial identity that places Russia’s imperial periphery at the center of the “Russian” experience.     

Max weber's vision of economic sociology

Max Weber's economic sociology is usually associated with The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–1905), but in this paper I show that what Weber himself called his “Wirtschaftssoziologie”, or economic sociology, looked quite different and was something that he developed during the last year of his life, 1919–1920. I present and outline Weber's (later) economic sociology and pay particular attention to his ideas of “economic (social) action” and of the three different forms of capitalism (rational capitalism, political capitalism and traditional capitalism). I also show that to Weber, economic sociology was part of a more general science of economics that he often referred to as “social economics” (“Sozialökonomik”). The paper ends with a comparison between the paradigm of economic sociology, which can be found in the work of Max Weber, and the paradigm of what is known as New Economic Sociology.     

Durkheim on Religion and Moral Community in Modernity*

Durkheim's theory of religion is approached from the perspective of his lifelong concern with the question of meaning and moral order in modern society. This emphasis naturally leads to a consideration of wider themes informing Durkheim's sociology of religion than are usually found in analyses focusing exclusively on his treatment of primitive religion in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1964). Durkheim sees as the distinguishing feature of modernity the progressive emancipation of the individual from traditional sources of influence. The evolution toward greater individuation, culminating in the “cult of the individual” or “religion of humanity,” is set by Durkheim within the context of the role of collective ideals in promoting social change and in the maintenance of moral order. Religion, the major symbolic expression of societal wide ideals, is identified as the key variable which enables Durkheim to reconcile the competing demands of individuals for freedom with the interests of society in collective welfare.     

Durkheim and The Structure of Social Action*

The analysis of Durkheim in The Structure of Social Action is integral to Parsons's discussion of the utilitarian-positivist tradition and the emergence of a voluntaristic theory of action from it. The four “stages” of theoretical argument in Durkheim can be related directly to the four defining elements of the “utilitarian dilemma,” namely empiricism, rationality, atomism, and the randomness of ends. The most questionable aspect of Parsons's argument is the alleged stubbornness of Durkheim's empiricism. On the other hand, much of the criticism of Parsons's argument, by Pope in particular, although also by Scott and Warner, Is either misdirected or itself questionable. The development and conclusions of Durkheim's moral sociology are as Parsons claims, and form a viable basis for a non-positivist theory of action.     

The sociologist and the state. An assessment of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology

This paper provides an assessment of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology based on a reading of his posthumously published lectures on the state in Sur l'État. It argues that the state was a foundational element in Bourdieu's rendition of the symbolic order of everyday life. As such, the state becomes equally pivotal in Bourdieu's sociology, the applicability of which rests on the existence of the state, which stabilizes the social fields and their symbolic action that constitute the object of sociology. The state, which Bourdieu considers a ‘meta'‐ordering principle in social life, ensures that sociology has a well‐ordered object of study, vis‐à‐vis which it can posit itself as ‘meta‐meta’. The state thus functions as an epistemic guarantee in Bourdieu's sociology. A critical analysis of Bourdieu's sociology of the state offers the chance of a more fundamental overall assessment of Bourdieu's conception of sociology that has relevance for any critical sociological perspective that rests on the assumption of a meta‐social entity, such as the state in Bourdieu's work, as a final ordering instance.     

Understanding Georg Simmel

Abstract

This paper makes two basic claims. First, Simmel was aware of the Als-Ob (“As-If”) before Vaihinger published his Die Philosophie des Als-Ob (The Philosophy of As-If) (Vaihinger, 1911 [1935]), and he used the As-If in his epistemology of the social sciences. It is difficult to understand Simmel's sociology without recognizing the role of the As-If. However, this essential part of Simmel's epistemology of the social sciences almost has gone unreported in the standard literature. Second, Simmel formulated a concept of relativity. This concept, too, is an important part of his epistemology, yet it is not understood well. Only through an appreciation of his view of relativity can Simmel's concept Wechselwirkung (usually translated as “reciprocal interaction” but more exactly translated as “reciprocal effect”) be interpreted properly. Without an understanding of his concept of relativity Simmel's form-content relation does not convey the sense intended. This paper demonstrates that the form-content relation as used by Simmel is, in current terminology, the theory-model relation. Finally, use is made of my explication of Simmel's epistemology to clarify some relations between Simmel's ideas and Durkheim's position.