Methodology and Theory in North Africa

It is not the purpose here to reiterate all the details of Ibn Khaldun's cyclical theory. However, it is useful to understand the outlines of how he applied his methodology to his particular subject, the human societies or civilizations of North Africa and Spain, for the implications of his cyclical theory cannot be fully grasped without this knowledge. It is worth citing Franz Rosenthal's prescient observation, derived from his grammatical analysis of Ibn Khaldun's full title, that “The grammatical connection is conceived by Ibn Khaldun as a logical connection, suggesting a causal nexus between ‘early beginnings’ and ‘subsequent history.’ ”³⁸

Although Rosenthal here is referring to the entire three-volume history, he offers a critical insight into the theory Ibn Khaldun outlines in Book 1, which indeed has a sequential logical structure that explains or is the context for his cyclical model of 14th century North African and Iberian history.

Returning first to the muqaddimāt of chapter 1, the first propositions or axioms that Ibn Khaldun used to develop his theory were the deterministic effects of environment and diet upon human character. Ibn Khaldun derived these from the Greeks, either indirectly through al-Idrisi, whom he quotes extensively, or, in the case of diet, directly from Galen. In terms of climate, it was in the middle or temperate zones that civilization flourished. This effect, Ibn Khaldun explains, philosophers attributed to the angle of the sun, which, he, Ibn Khaldun, then describes and claims to have “proved” through burhān.³⁹

However, more important than that well-known feature of Muslim geographical knowledge are the muqaddimāt that are rarely considered in discussions of Ibn Khaldun's theory. These are his assumptions about the determining influence of local environment and the food available there that varied with type and relative abundance or scarcity.⁴⁰

In brief, Ibn Khaldun argues, desert inhabitants who lack grain and seasonings but who live on meat and milk and who just eat less are healthier, better looking, superior in character, and more intelligent than people who eat agricultural products, seasonings, and fruits. The reason, he hypothesizes, is that excess food produces moisture that causes obesity and, as the moisture rises to the brain, stupidity. Animals of the desert such as the gazelle have superior physiques, health, and, yes, intellects, than do those who live on the plains, such as the goat, where food is plentiful. The same is true of human beings. People who eat meat and milk, abstain from pleasure and live like ascetics, are also more religious than people accustomed to luxury. The reason or cause, sabab, for this is “habit” (עāda) or custom that becomes part of a person's “character” or “nature,” his/her jins or ṭabīעa.⁴¹

This assumption, that each environment and its diet determine physical, mental, and spiritual qualities of the inhabitants, is the propositional basis for and chronological first phase in his dynamic, dialectical model.

The determining effects of local environment and an environment's characteristic diet gave rise in the 14th century Maghrib to two “natural groups,” groups with distinct jins or ṭabīעa. These were the bedouins and the sedentary and urban dwellers, the ahl haḍarī. Ibn Khaldun evidently means these natural groups to be the usūl, fundamental principles or axioms that he alludes to in the heading for chapter 2. These natural groups constitute “universal” or “certain” muqaddimāt, “those derived from sense data, which are publicly accepted and need no evidence by witnesses.”⁴²

Ibn Khaldun's theory is grounded in the contrasting and inherently antagonistic quality of these two “natural groups.” However, it is important to note that he also says that bedouins are “older than sedentary society and prior to it,” another phrase that has both a conventional and philosophical meaning.⁴³ In fact, it has several possible philosophical meanings, including the two that fit here: “prior in nature,” and “prior in cause” to something else.⁴⁴ That is, one thing cannot exist without another or is the cause connecting the two things—and the first word in this phrase is, suggestively, aqdam, a derivative from the same root as muqaddima and that also has this technical, philosophical, meaning. Bedouin, that is, are “prior in nature” to urban society; they have a telos, an “ultimate object or goal” that leads to or causes urban society.⁴⁵

In the remainder of Book 2, Ibn Khaldun elaborates on his earlier muqaddimāt as well as cataloguing the many accidents or aעrāḍ associated with them. Thus, he analyzes bedouin and sedentary differences in courage, reliance on laws, and other traits that are the necessary accidents of each group. However, he also argues that some of these traits are themselves “natural” characteristics or axioms, the most fundamental of which is עaṣabīyya, family or group feeling, whose intensity varies with environment. After citing unnamed “philosophical works” that teach that “man is political by nature”—an apparent paraphrase of Aristotle's famous axiom, Ibn Khaldun then writes that “By his [man's] very nature [author's italics] he needs the cooperation of others to satisfy his needs.”⁴⁶

This observation is thus the third axiom or fundamental truth that fuels Ibn Khaldun's historical cycles. These three axioms are environment determines character, man is naturally “political” (read “social”), and therefore different environments inevitably or naturally generate distinct social groups.⁴⁷ However, the telos of human society is to evolve from the simpler and more pure bedouin nature to complex and progressively more decadent sedentary and urban life.

As part of this inevitable development determined by human beings own “nature” kingship or royal authority (mulk) develops, which is the “natural end” or “natural termination point” of עaṣabīyya.⁴⁸

Kingship itself is “natural for human beings.”⁴⁹ However, that does not mean that human agency is involved, rather kingship arises because of the “necessity of existence,” ḍarūra al-wujūd.⁵⁰ These are the propositions or more precisely the “bases” (qawāעid) that inform chapter 3. These are not “certain” or “universal” truths or axioms we know innately. Indeed Ibn Khaldun has said previously that royal authority is an “essential accident” and remarks in chapter 4 that kingship or royal authority is to civilization as form is to matter.⁵¹ As form cannot exist without matter, when civilization disintegrates its form, the dynasty inevitably decays as well.⁵² The stages through which a dynasty evolves are also “natural,” reflecting, as they do, shifting environmental and social conditions experienced by a bedouin community as it moves from a rural to an urban homeland. Ibn Khaldun identifies the “prestige” of a given ruler as an accidental quality, by implication a necessary accident that evolves with each “natural” stage of the dynasty. He also makes it clear in this chapter that he is constructing a model rather than trying to offer a comprehensive portrait of a culture. He, thus, remarks in an illuminating aside on government offices that he will discuss these positions, not to examine their legal status in Islamic law, but only to illustrate how they are generated—as accidents—by “the nature of civilization and human existence” (ṭabīעat al-עumrān wa-wujūd al-bashar).⁵³

Having established these principles Ibn Khaldun devotes chapter 4 to a discussion of sedentary culture, the culture determined by the nature of this particular type of civilization, and most of chapter 5 to identifying the “accidents” of sedentary culture such as, for example, crafts—architecture, carpentry, weaving, calligraphy, singing, book making, and so forth. The last two of these crafts he discusses are particularly important for reasons connected with the speculative intellect that he explains in chapter 6. These are writing and calculation or arithmetic and their broader significance is due to the fact that each involves abstraction. The process of writing triggers an instantaneous mental process in which the mind shifts from the letter to the idea being conveyed, what Ibn Khaldun here characterizes as “intellectual speculation” (al-naẓar al-עaqlī), producing through repetition, an analytical habit or, what he says is an actual increase in intelligence. Repeated calculation produces a similar mental effect, inducing habits of reasoning or deduction, istidlāl, and speculation, naẓar, that stimulates the mental processes collectively known as “intelligence.”⁵⁴

These discussions conclude chapter 5 and seamlessly connect it to chapter 6, which Ibn Khaldun begins with an explanation of “human thought,” which distinguishes mankind from animals. This explanation is the chapter's muqaddima, perhaps simply an “introduction” but certainly a generally accepted truth—that man's ability to think is a unique trait in the animal kingdom.

Aristotle, Greek Historiography, and the Annales

By developing a philosophical methodology for historical research, Ibn Khaldun both distinguished himself within the Greco–Islamic rationalist tradition and also anticipated the “scientific” methodology of Émile Durkheim and, in somewhat more diffuse ways, that of later historians of the Annales school. Viewed first from the perspective of classical and postclassical Greek historians, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Polybius, Ibn Khaldun represented the apex of Greek historical thought by insisting that history should be what Aristotle termed a theoretical science, a search for truth conducted as a logical enquiry based on axiomatic truths, logic, and an understanding of regional and chronological peculiarities. Polybius, a man usually seen as the last major Greek historian, may have refined the critical research methodology of his predecessors, but he was not influenced by Greek philosophy nor did he fundamentally alter the nature of historical writing. By characterizing his work as pragmatika historia, political and military history, and by emphasizing that historians should be practical men who write history informed by their own experience and personal enquiry, Polybius essentially reiterated the ideas of Thucydides. He improved on his illustrious predecessor in one fundamental way, by insisting that explanation was the principal task of the historian.⁵⁵

And while Thucydides may have surpassed Herodotus because of his “narrative structure,” “attention to significant detail,” and “emotional sweep,” he was essentially following Herodotus—but writing more carefully about a bigger Greek war.⁵⁶ He was not interested in “ultimate causes.”⁵⁷

The classical and postclassical Greek historians were most of all historians of Greek politics; they rarely deviated from this quintessential Greek preoccupation. Consistent with this preoccupation was their lack of intrinsic interest in other societies, which is not surprising, given their contempt for foreign languages. Nonetheless, Polybius was scrupulous about accurately relating the past, whether it was flattering to the Greeks or not.⁵⁸

Greek historians were primarily concerned with accurately chronicling past events. They may have seen varying patterns in human history—exemplified by Thucydides' belief in the constancy of human nature—but they usually shied away from metaphysical explanations.⁵⁹ Only the constitutional researches in Aristotle's school raised broader issues, but in the name of philosophy, not history.⁶⁰ “To the Greeks, therefore, history was not one of the sciences with clear methods which create a body of undisputed knowledge.”⁶¹

As far as Aristotle's influence on Greek historiography in the classical and postclassical periods is concerned, the classical scholar, Simon Hornblower, wrote the following:

Hornblower does not show that Aristotle had any influence whatsoever on Greek historiography, but he does suggest that Aristotle might be seen as a pivotal figure in what might be called “structuralist” historiography, whose first known practitioner was Ibn Khaldun and whose later devotees were philosophically influenced European scholars of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.

The French geographer Yves Lacoste tentatively identified Ibn Khaldun's significance within a broader historiographical tradition. Writing as a Marxist in a delightfully provocative, iconoclastic tone, Lacoste perceptively remarks of Ibn Khaldun that “Until the nineteenth century only Ibn Khaldun had improved upon Thucydides. Thucydides invented history, but Ibn Khaldun turned it into a science.”⁶³

Lacoste is correct; Ibn Khaldun conceived of and practiced history as a science, that is, as an object of philosophical inquiry. Yet, Lacoste, for all of his unusual insights into Ibn Khaldun's brilliant innovations, does not describe his work as “scientific” because he was a Greco–Islamic intellectual and most of all an Aristotelian. He only alludes to the possibility of a connection between Ibn Khaldun's methodology and Aristotle.⁶⁴ Lacoste considers the Muqaddima to be the first scientific history because “Ibn Khaldun…can be legitimately considered the first theoretician” which of course he was—but because of his philosophical inheritance.⁶⁵ Of course it was just the use of theory that Émile Durkheim later considered to be the attribute that made sociology “scientific.”⁶⁶

Lacoste is exceptional in that, unlike most scholars who have commented on Ibn Khaldun, he is not interested in the Muqaddima primarily because of the model it proposes to explain North African and Islamic history. Rather, he is intrigued by the work because, in a limited way, Ibn Khaldun has anticipated historical materialism and has offered certain clues to underdevelopment in North Africa—and more generally in the Third World. Even though he does not exactly say so, it is possible to believe that Lacoste considers Ibn Khaldun to be “scientific” because he sees him as a precursor to Marx, who has indeed been identified as a “scientific structuralist.”⁶⁷

Moreover, anyone who has even skimmed the abridged version of the Muqaddima can see that Ibn Khaldun's theory is both dialectical and materialistic. It is dialectical in the Hegelian sense that the historical progression of a particular “bedouin” lineage into an urban dynasty inevitably results in its decay and destruction. It is materialistic in that Ibn Khaldun attributes the fundamental differences between the עumrān badawī and עumrān haḍarī to their respective physical and economic circumstances. Another obvious parallel in the two men's thought is each man's notion of culture as a reflection of some more substantial reality: Marx's concept of a cultural superstructure reflecting and/or echoing the socioeconomic substructure; in Ibn Khaldun's terms the essential accidents of the true nature of things. However, Ibn Khaldun and Marx obviously differed first, in that their societies were so distinct, and because Ibn Khaldun's dialectic was cyclical whereas Marx's was millenarian.

Ibn Khaldun was hardly a Marxist, and Lacoste does not claim that he was. Lacoste occasionally uses Marxist terminology to oversimplify and even misrepresent some of Ibn Khaldun's ideas, as when he observes that Ibn Khaldun believed that “the mode of production determines broadly similar structures and developments in societies widely separated by space and time.” Among other things Ibn Khaldun believed that the nutritional, psychological, and social consequences of surplus wealth—however, derived, from trade or craft production—contributed to the decay and ultimate collapse of urban societies and their dynasties. However, Lacoste is surely right in his perception that Ibn Khaldun's discussion of economic phenomena is analytical, unlike the analysis of most of Lacoste's own European contemporaries, and not normative.

With Ibn Khaldun, we do seem to be in the presence of a very “modern” economic as well as a methodological mind.⁶⁹

Lacoste is the first scholar to try to place Ibn Khaldun in a broad historiographical framework outside of Islamic historiography—and he is right to do so. In terms of their methodology, it is their philosophical training that prompted both Ibn Khaldun and Marx to search for underlying patterns in their tumultuous environments. However, because Lacoste is not particularly interested in philosophy, he is not altogether successful in demonstrating the link between the two men. Yet, in historiographical terms, Ibn Khaldun deserves to be seen as an heir of Greek and Greco–Islamic philosophers—and as a precursor of Marx and other philosophical historians and philosophically oriented scholars of enlightenment and modern Europe who had absorbed Greek materialist assumptions and Aristotle's logical apparatus. Durkheim is the major figure in this tradition—as the philosopher turned sociologist and the teacher of Marc Bloch—but he had precursors in both Britain and France.

European Structuralism

In Britain, historians associated with the remarkable 18th century intellectual fluorescence known as the “Scottish Enlightenment” expressed ideas similar in a very general sense to those of Ibn Khaldun. This is not surprising, because Aristotle influenced some of these men. John Millar (1735–1801), a Professor of Law at Glasgow University, reiterated Ibn Khaldun's critique of popular history by denouncing traditional historians' preoccupation with “that common surface of events, which occupies the details of the vulgar historian.”⁷⁰

Dugald Stewart (1753–1828), first a Professor of mathematics and then of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, invented the term “conjectural history” to describe a kind of history writing by analogy and comparison to determine uniformities in human nature and institutions. Scots of the period participated in a European intellectual culture, and this is one of the principal reasons why some of them embraced the rationalism usually associated with continental philosophy rather than British empiricism.⁷¹ They directly derived some of their ideas from Europe's most formidable philosophical historian, Montesquieu, and it is especially Montesquieu, the influential enlightenment figure, who was the precursor of Durkheim.

Montesquieu was familiar with Aristotle's works and those of other Greek thinkers, including Galen, although his commentaries on Aristotle have been lost.⁷²

The formative Greek philosophical influence on Montesquieu seems unmistakable in the basic pattern of his argument in Esprit de Lois. First, he argued for the determining effect of climate and environment on the development of social types.⁷³ Second, as Durkheim observed, Montesquieu was the first person to understand that social phenomena were actual realities, and that religion, law, morality, trade, and so forth can only be understood in connection with the nature of a particular society. Like Millar and Ibn Khaldun, Montesquieu dismissed the importance of episodic history, and very much like Ibn Khaldun, he concentrated on determining causal relationships by identifying the conditions that give rise to institutions. “Laws,” he wrote, “are necessary connections which follow from the nature of things.” They are, in other words, Ibn Khaldun's “necessary accidents.” Thus, Montesquieu laid the basis for the new science that Émile Durkheim consciously espoused, unaware of Ibn Khaldun's achievement.

Montesquieu (1689–1755) was the subject of Durkheim's Latin thesis and a formidable influence in the evolution of what has come to be classified as “social scientific” thinking.⁷⁴

It is difficult to determine which ideas Durkheim derived from Montesquieu and which directly from Aristotle. As a student of philosophy Durkheim was intimately familiar with most of Aristotle's works.⁷⁵ Indeed, Durkheim himself reported that his teacher, Émile Boutroux, had told him of Aristotle's assertion that each science had to have its own special subject of investigation, the argument Ibn Khaldun cites when justifying his new historical science.⁷⁶ There is, as Donald Nielsen has remarked:

He referred in his 1888 lecture on “sociology” to “The illustrious example of Aristotle, who was the first to see society as a natural fact, [and] remained almost without imitators,” but also went on to say, “In the eighteenth century the same idea was indeed reborn with Montesquieu and Condorcet.”⁷⁸

Durkheim's familiarity with Aristotle and Montesquieu explains why his approach to the study of social life was similar to Ibn Khaldun's analysis of human society. Both men were pursuing the same goal with the same philosophical training. That is, both Ibn Khaldun and Durkheim wanted to establish a science of society using Greek and predominantly Aristotelian logical methodology. Indeed, Durkheim wrote in his 1909 essay the “Sociology and the Social Sciences” that the ultimate goal of sociology was the “philosophical part of the science.”⁷⁹

In that essay, he outlines the “Principal Divisions of Sociology” and says that the principal goal of his first category, “Social Morphology,” is “the study of the geographic base of various peoples in terms of its relationships with their social organizations.”⁸⁰ Durkheim's “social morphology” is not formally expressed in axiomatic terms, but his formulation is remarkably close to Ibn Khaldun's when he remarks that whether rural or urban:

Elsewhere, Durkheim says that “the goal of sociology is to explain social phenomenon in terms of their hidden essences,” and that societies, like the rest of the world, are subject to laws that “derive necessarily from their nature and that express it,” an argument that is a virtual paraphrase of Montesquieu's observation that “laws express the nature of things.”⁸²

Durkheim's emphasis on “hidden essences” and the “nature” of societies also virtually reproduces Ibn Khaldun's ideas—or those of Aristotle—and when he discusses “collective phenomena” or what he also calls “social facts” he is talking about “necessary accidents.” These phenomena are Durkheim's principal concern; they are the subjects of sociology. He identifies them as “life itself,” or more particularly, as the various aspects of what he terms “social physiology”: religion, morality, law, economics, linguistics, esthetics, and so forth. Durkheim coined this term because he believed that these collective phenomena were to geography or social morphology as physiology was to biology, and his explanation uses the idea of structure in a physical sense that anticipates its later use in history and the social sciences. “In biology,” he writes, “while anatomy (also called morphology) analyzes the structure of living beings and the mode of composition of their tissues and organs, physiology studies the functions of these tissues and organs.”⁸³

In the case of society “Durkheim's view…was largely shaped by Montesquieu's idea that society is a structural system [author's italics] composed of individuals or subgroups behaving in certain kinds of ways.”⁸⁴ Durkheim's ultimate goal was to see in “species” of various classes of “social facts” “the unity of the genus,” that is the particular in the universal, and he wanted to establish “general laws of which the very diverse laws established by the special sciences are only particular forms.”⁸⁵

It is not surprising, given Durkheim's philosophical training, that he like Ibn Khaldun, invokes comparison, a form of inductive reasoning, as a fundamental part of the logical method that scholars must use to determine the truth about societies—and in the 20th century, sociology is the comparative discipline par excellence. Durkheim believed that only through comparison, more particularly through comparative history, could sociologists study the various institutions that concerned them. “We have only one way,” he wrote:

“Experiment,” he concludes, “is fundamentally just a form of comparison; it consists in making fact vary, of producing it in various forms which are subsequently methodically compared.”⁸⁶

It is not the purpose here also to point out the many differences in the situations and theories of Ibn Khaldun and Durkheim, men so widely separated by centuries and such revolutionary natural philosophers as Isaac Newton. It might be noticed that rural Frenchmen of the late 19th century were not empowered by the cavalry of pastoral nomads to threaten or even overwhelm Bordeaux, Paris, and other cities, so Durkheim's perception of the particular problems of social solidarity in his era was inevitably different from Ibn Khaldun's insight into the social relations of his day. These particularities would have to be different, because the social essences and, therefore, the “necessary accidents” in each case were quite distinct. Indeed, it is not clear whether Durkheim believed, as Ibn Khaldun did, in a kind of complex cyclical teleology, that is, a dialectic. He accepted that primitive societies evolved into more complex ones, but it is not obvious that he thought, as did Ibn Khaldun, that the two coexisted, as for example, in the rural and urban France of the late 19th century.⁸⁷

In view of Durkheim's philosophical training and preoccupation with social solidarity, it is to be expected that the program of the Annales school, especially that of Marc Bloch, seems like a recent if only partial reprise of Ibn Khaldun's goal for a new historical science. The Annales School has, in fact, been characterized in a peculiar formulation as the most “scientistic” historical school, often without authors specifying exactly what scientistic means.⁸⁸

Perhaps it means, as it meant for Ibn Khaldun, the combination of a rigorous critical methodology with sophisticated conceptualization born of philosophical training. Neither Marc Bloch nor Lucien Fèbvre—especially Fèbvre—was as explicitly “scientific” as Ibn Khaldun or Durkheim in the sense of consciously establishing a new field of study on Aristotelian scientific that is philosophical principles.⁸⁹ Moreover, Bloch is well known for emphasizing the study of individuals and their motivations. However, Bloch in particular, and especially in his later work, was strongly influenced by Durkheimian sociology and has been characterized by some scholars as a “historical sociologist.”⁹⁰ In 1939, he said that he was among the historians who were “accustomed to a greater or lesser degree to expressing ourselves in sociological terms,” even though in later life he also criticized Durkheim's attempt to fashion a human science.⁹¹ The influence of sociology and also historical geography on Bloch and later members of the ambiguously defined Annales school may be the reason why some 20th-century historians have found both Ibn Khaldun and also some Annalistes antihumanistic because of their attachment to the explanatory power of “structure,” the hallmark of philosophical history and its intellectual offspring, sociology.⁹² Structure seems to mean for these critics exactly what “essence” meant for Aristotle and Ibn Khaldun, an idea that reduced social attributes such as law, not to speak of daily human activities, to the status of “necessary accidents.”

In any case, Marc Bloch's Feudal Society is a book Ibn Khaldun might have written had he lived in Europe of the 14th or the 19th century. Exhibiting Bloch's Durkheimian concern for “social facts,” the book's central concern, as its title suggests, is social cohesion.⁹³

In this quite distinct environment Ibn Khaldun, like Bloch, might have largely ignored towns when discussing the evolution of European society from the 9th through the 12th century. Bloch, instead of contrasting rural and urban societies, as he might have done if he had been writing of the medieval Middle East with its great cities of Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, Samarqand, and Cordoba, studies the nature of social cohesion almost entirely outside of towns. Beginning with “The Solidarity of the Kinship Group” he goes on to discuss “Vassalage as a Substitute for the Kinship Tie,” and “The Transformation of Human Relationships” in the later manorial system. He concludes by discussing the beginning of the evolution of the feudal political order into nation states, but his central concern remains “Feudalism as a Type of Society.”

As part of his attempt to define the nature of European feudalism, Bloch raises the very question of genus and species that Ibn Khaldun or any logically trained historian with a “speculative intellect” would want to answer. That is, was the social, juridical, and political system known in Europe as feudalism unique to Europe or a regional variant of a broader human phenomenon? In trying to answer this question, Bloch turns to the comparative method advocated by Ibn Khaldun and Durkheim, a basic logical technique for defining “universals.”⁹⁴

In the penultimate chapter of Feudal Society titled “Feudalism as a Type of Society,” Bloch includes “A Cross-Section of Comparative History” that he devoted to pointing out the commonalities between European and Japanese society.⁹⁵ Yet, this common logical means of generalizing, of moving beyond the species to the genus, was just one aspect of comparison that interested him.

In his last and incomplete work, The Historian's Craft, he discussed comparison in a different sense, one that Ibn Khaldun also advocated as the essential mental tool of the critical method for establishing the truth or likelihood of a particular historical report.⁹⁶

The historian, Ibn Khaldun said, “must compare similarities and differences between the present and the past [or distantly located conditions]. He must know the causes of the similarities in certain cases and of the differences in others…. He must check transmitted information with the basic principles he knows.”⁹⁷ Characterizing comparison as the “dialectic” of historical criticism, Bloch demonstrates the usefulness of comparison in a way reminiscent of Ibn Khaldun's discussion. Bloch writes “…rightly understood, critical comparison is not content to collate evidences from the same plane of time. A human phenomenon is always linked to a chain which spans the ages.”⁹⁸

The scientistic nature of Marc Bloch's work is best understood, therefore, not by the “false positivism” that he ridiculed, but by a kind of diffuse Aristotelianism mediated through Émile Durkheim, less clearly articulated than Ibn Khaldun no doubt, but based on the same assumptions, at least in his later work. However, in the case of Bloch's disciple and most prominent successor, Fernand Braudel, scientific refers only to the conduct of research while the philosophical core of Durkheim's and Bloch's work becomes so diffuse as to almost disappear. Braudel proclaims his intellectual debt to Bloch—“no aspect of his work is foreign to me”—but Bloch's influence seems most evident in Braudel's commitment to the importance of geography rather than to Bloch's or Durkheim's philosophical inheritance. In the Mediterranean he constructs a tripartite argument that has the appearance of the philosophical method of Ibn Khaldun, but it lacks Ibn Khaldun's logical rigor. Thus, Braudel's division of the Mediterranean into environmental structure, social conjuncture, and narrative of events seems to echo the distinction that Aristotle, עUmar Khayyam and Ibn Khaldun make between “essences,” “accidents,” and meaningless events narrated for the crowd. However, Braudel does not attribute his distinction between structure and conjuncture to philosophy, but to economics.⁹⁹

He generously attributes the phrase l'histoire événementielle to the French historians Paul Lacombe and François Simiand. He presents his three sections as logically independent entities as he surveys the Mediterranean world's environment, social structure, and finally its military and political events, but he never argues that one caused or determined the other. Only in very minor and passing discussion of the environment does Braudel use the philosophical language of Ibn Khaldun and Durkheim, but curiously enough he does so when discussing transhumance, remarking, “Any logical study should begin with this basic agricultural situation,” for “all transhumance is the result of a demanding agricultural situation.”¹⁰⁰ However, Braudel is probably using “logical” here in the common rather than the philosophical sense, for ultimately the Mediterranean remains, as the French critic Claude Lefort has said, a work of pointillism.¹⁰¹