Journal of the History of the Human Sciences (Dec. 2022) Vol. 41.

https://doi.org/10.4000/rhsh.7467

Ibn Khaldun in Early German-language Sociological Theory: A Historical Case of South-North Reception

Wiebke Keim

Abstract: In the course of recent debates, Ibn Khaldun has been (re-)claimed not as a precursor, but as one of the “founding fathers” of sociology. This entails the suspicion that Ibn Khaldun’s legacy, especially his Muqaddima as an important reference in the foundational phase of modern European sociology, has been sidelined in the construction of the sociological canon and thus remains an unacknowledged source today.
This paper presents a historical case of South-North reception of sociological theory. A systematic assessment of the reception of Ibn Khaldun in early German-language sociology reveals that while his acknowledgment was quantitatively rather low, it was indeed qualitatively interesting. In particular, two important early sociologists, Ludwig Gumplowicz and Franz Oppenheimer, mobilized references to his Muqadimma in the context of their “sociological theory of the state.” They discovered the fundamental theoretical convergence between their approach and the early Arab scholar. Against the ahistorical philosophical idea of the state and the non-historical juridical idea of the state, both authors defended the sociological idea of the state. It is the conquest of one tribe over another with the aim of economic exploitation through political subjugation that gives rise to the state. Here, Ibn Khaldun appeared as a particularly reliable reference. His reception in the works of Gumplowicz and Oppenheimer also sheds a different light on the much-voiced refusal of imported social theory as being irrelevant.

Ibn Khaldun: The Author, His Oeuvre, and the Historical Context of Its Reception

In recent years, an intensification of claims about the exclusion of scholarship emerging from scholars of the global South has seriously challenged the history of sociology. By now, Ibn Khaldun has become a well-known figure within the history of sociology. This article traces his reception throughout the foundational phase of German sociology.¹ This requires a brief introduction on the author and his chief work as well as on the historical context of this reception process.

Born in Tunis in 1332 into a family of Andalusian origins, Ibn Khaldun was broadly educated in the fields of classical Islamic education, Arabic linguistics, law and jurisprudence, as well as mathematics, logic and philosophy. Apart from being a scholar and a renowned expert in religious teachings, he worked as a politician and diplomat for various rulers. He passed away in 1406 in Cairo. Only a few years later, the Portuguese conquered Ceuta (1415) and started their adventure into colonial modernity, putting a definite end to the period of glory of the Islamic empires: “Ibn Khaldun represents the end point of this history of which Islam was the centre at the point in time when it rendered its keys to the Occident. […] Soon the world would be one, and Europe, which constituted that unity, would recognize itself as its legitimate centre.”² Sociology as the academic discipline of modern society has carried with it and legitimized this Eurocentrism. How has it dealt with Ibn Khaldun during the years of its emergence?

Ibn Khaldun’s main work was originally conceived as a history of the Berbers. It is divided into seven books, the first of which, the Muqaddima, can be considered a separate work. The reception analysed here concerns exclusively the Muqaddima. It consists of a programmatic text laying the foundations of a new and autonomous science, the “science of human culture or civilization” (‘ilm al-’umrân). As such, it includes a definition of its object (society or human civilization); a methodology to distinguish between true and false claims in human history; a general theoretical framework corresponding to a cyclical model of social conflict and human development, and more precisely, of the rise and fall of states; and a series of precise concepts such as nomadic and sedentary groups, or asabiya, a term that has remained in Arabic and whose meaning has been rendered, depending on the readers, as “esprit de corps”, “group solidarity” or “nationalism”.

The structure of the Muqaddima displays a fundamental symmetry with the founding works in sociology. This is what many comments underline: Ibn Khaldun had drawn the outlines of anthropology and of sociology,³ making him an early, if not the earliest sociologist⁴ or even considered the founding father of sociology;⁵ he was a precursor of Darwin⁶ and provided the only science of the state in Islam.⁷ And yet, more often than not, he was considered rather as a “precursor” than a founder of modern sociology.⁸ The main argument found in the literature to consider him a precursor rather than a “founding father” is not grounded in his scholarly achievements, but in the widely held assumption that he had no direct successors and founded no school of thought but stood out as a single genius.⁹ Against this view, others have embedded his oeuvre in prior scholarship and followed his reception by Arabic scholars prior to his European “discovery”.¹⁰ Nevertheless, there seems to be agreement, at least, that there was nothing close to a Khaldunian school of thought.

The importance of Ibn Khaldun for contemporary Arabic and Islamic social sciences seems to have largely built on his reception in Europe through the socialization of Arab intellectuals into the modern European and Eurocentric social sciences.¹¹ At two founding congresses of the social sciences in Cairo at the beginning of the 1960s, Ibn Khaldun was claimed as the founding figure of several disciplines. The idea of a possible influence on Auguste Comte, who would have silenced the Arabic origins of sociology, was put forth by ‘Abd al-Azîz ‘Izzat.¹² This leads me to inquire more in depth into the reception of Ibn Khaldun’s work in the foundational phase of European sociology, focusing here on the German-speaking domain.

Ibn Khaldun’s “rediscovery”, or modern reading, sets in with his reception by European orientalists. Indeed, we owe the translations and European editions of his oeuvre to efforts made within Oriental Studies. From there, he was acknowledged within the emerging modern social sciences. Alatas deplores that despite increasing scholarly discussion of his oeuvre, Ibn Khaldun has remained marginal within the sociological tradition in the sense that “he generally does not appear in textbooks or courses on a par with Marx, Weber, Durkheim and other founders of sociology.”¹³ He interprets this as a result of the Eurocentrism inherent in the social sciences, i.e. it is generally only North Atlantic theorists who are considered to be relevant for the craft even in non-European contexts, whereas the same does not hold true for thinkers from the southern continents.¹⁴ However, this study discovers a historical paradox: while Ibn Khaldun has lately been acknowledged and honoured as an important figure in the history of sociology, those who introduced him into the emerging discipline have largely been forgotten.

Before we start our enquiry, a brief note on the translations and editions of the Muqaddima is necessary.¹⁵ Alatas assumed that the European interest in Ibn Khaldun developed on the shoulders of prior Ottoman works.¹⁶ While this is true to some extent—the Ottoman translations and comments on his text were at least partly acknowledged by early European translators and commentators—we have to pay attention to the precise historical circumstances under which Ibn Khaldun’s works were first received in Europe. The consulted literature indicates two main “routes of entry” through Paris and Vienna.

Orientalists’ interest in him did not happen in a vacuum. It fell into the period of European expansion, in particular French colonization of the Maghreb,¹⁷ in the course of which the French government encouraged Orientalist research to further knowledge on the region.¹⁸ French Orientalist Silvestre de Sacy (1758-1838) acquainted Europe with Ibn Khaldun following Bonaparte’s campaign in Egypt and Syria (1798-1801).¹⁹ And it was two decades after the conquest of Algeria that the Ministry of War commissioned a translation of Ibn Khaldun’s History of the Berbers, i.e., the first part of his Kitab al-‘ibar. His historical work was to guide the French army and colonial administration through the reality of North African society.²⁰ Ibn Khaldun’s insights on the conflict between Berber and Arab tribes, between nomadic and sedentary groups became common place within French discourse on its North African colonies.²¹

The Orientalist Étienne Quatremère (1782-1857), who had already edited an Arabic edition of Ibn Khaldun’s historical works in 1857, known as the “édition de Boulac” was to translate it into French. He passed away before he could complete the task. William Mac Guckin, baron de Slane (1801-1878) was then commissioned with the translation.²²

Slane had already translated extracts from Ibn Khaldun’s texts for the Journal asiatique and had published his autobiography. De Slane was both scholar and military official.²³ He had been sent to Algiers, Constantine, Malta and Istanbul by the French government to investigate the holdings of their libraries (1843-1846) and was appointed as chief interpreter of the army in Africa in 1846. Slane edited the Kitâb al ‘ibar in 1847-1851, translated it 1852-1856, as well as the Muqaddima in 1857 (under the French title Prolégomènes historiques).²⁴ In it, he did indeed refer to the Ottoman translations, which he found of poor quality, yet still helpful.²⁵ This brief contextualization should serve to illustrate, however, that it was not out of purely scholarly ambition and disinterested reception of the prior Ottoman works that the French translation was realized. The official support for such scholarly activity has to be seen within the broader context of colonization.²⁶

Besides France, Vienna appeared as a second center for the European reception of Ibn Khaldun. The German-language comments give the impression that their interest concerned first and foremost the more general, theoretical questions covered by Ibn Khaldun’s work, and less so the empirical parts that could be relevant for military or administrative purposes, a claim that would require a more thorough comparison of the two bodies of literature. The first German-language comment on Ibn Khaldun’s works seemed to have been published by the Vienna-based Orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall in 1822.²⁷ Equally influential seemed to have been a long comment, including a thorough summary of the Muqaddima, published in 1879 by Orientalist and politician Alfred von Kremer in the Proceedings of the Vienna Academy of Sciences.²⁸ Kremer refers to the French translation by Slane and Arabic original versions of the Muqaddima in parallel. If Hammer-Purgstall called Ibn Khaldun “the Arabic Montesquieu”, von Kremer found that Ibn Khaldun was one of the “most prominent minds of his people and his time” and therefore merited full attention, since “with the exception of Machiavelli and Vico, he is superior to all older European politicians.”²⁹ Orientalist and Egyptologist Eduard Meyer’s Elements of Anthropology is another source mentioning Ibn Khaldun that I come across in the following analysis.³⁰ No complete translation into German exists to this day. A first translation of large parts of the work was published by Annemarie Schimmel (1951), followed by Mathias Pätzold’s (1992) and Alma Giese’s (2011). The sociologists writing in German language, in whose reception of Ibn Khaldun we are here interested, refer to both Slane’s translation and the mentioned German comments on the Muqaddima.

Regarding the historical background to Ibn Khaldun’s reception, in the 19th century, the emergence of sociology started during the German and Habsburg empires (more precisely the period of Austrian history marked by Emperor Franz Joseph, 1830-1916). It unfolded through the First World War, the 1920s, and 1930s. Although this was the period of nationalism,³¹ there clearly was a germanophone academic landscape spanning Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Following Dirk Käsler³², I take 1934-1935, with the advent of National-Socialism, as the end of this initial phase.

The reception of Ibn Khaldun in early German-language sociology: analysis of a cross-section of representative literature

To get a sense of how Ibn Khaldun was received in this early phase of sociology, it seems best to begin by surveying a cross section of German-language sociological texts representative of the period. I used Käsler’s “Chronologische Liste der Lehrbücher der Soziologie auf dem Gebiet der deutschen Soziologie 1909-1934” (“Chronological list of sociology textbooks in the field of German sociology 1909-1934”)³³ to draw up a representative selection of texts. Taking this corpus as my starting point, I systematically traced the textual traces left by German reception of Ibn Khaldun.

This approach has, of course, its weaknesses. The exclusive reliance on texts inhibits a sense of the material conditions of the circulation of Ibn Khaldun’s works. This analysis would have to be complemented with data on library holdings to find out who had access to his works, and with information on the language competencies of representatives of early German-language sociology, since no German translation of Ibn Khaldun’s works existed at the time. Furthermore, this analysis focusses exclusively on reception within the emerging field of sociology and excludes works on Ibn Khaldun in other disciplines, such as Oriental Studies³⁴ or history.³⁵ The following analysis does not indicate any cross-fertilization between disciplines during the observed period. Additionally, the focus on explicit references will necessarily miss silent reception. Finally, apart from the difficulties associated with different transliterations of Ibn Khaldun’s name,³⁶ checking all fifty-four works for explicit mention of Ibn Khaldun proved challenging, as all those works did not have an index of proper names. I cannot exclude that in skimming over complete books including their footnotes in search for “Ibn Khaldun”, I might have missed some single references.

I complemented the chosen approach with two other research strategies. A search in the German National Library’s catalogue for books with “Ibn Khaldun” in the title for the period 1850-1935 generated zero results. The consultation of the Dietrich online site, the bibliography of German-language journal literature 1896-1944, generated three search results for the entire period, none of which were in the emerging field of sociology.³⁷

Getting back to Käsler’s authoritative list (see table in the appendix), out of fifty-four works, five explicitly mention Ibn Khaldun: Soziologie by Rudolf Eisler (1903); Einführung in die Soziologie by Wilhelm Jerusalem (1926); Oppenheimer’s System der Soziologie, volume II on the State (1926) and the historical volume IV, section 2 on the Middle Ages (1933); and Die Anfaenge der Gesellschaftslehre by Hans Proesler (1935).³⁸

Within this representative corpus of literature, the level of reception of Ibn Khaldun’s works was quantitatively very low. We can think of various reasons for this. Among other things, no German translation existed during that time. We can also assume a low level of circulation of the manuscript and its translations in libraries accessible to German scholars, something that I do not have the technical competency to check empirically. However, from this starting point, I could make out various other works that refer to Ibn Khaldun and despite the relatively low quantitative impact, it is a qualitatively interesting case of reception. Clearly, Ibn Khaldun was not an authoritative reference at the time. Those who relied on his work did so for quite specific purposes.

In order to analyze the way in which early German-speaking sociologists referred to Ibn Khaldun, we can start out from Alatas’ categorization of the “[w]riting and research on Ibn Khaldun” that, according to him, “can be seen to fall under the following categories: 1) Biographies; 2) Works on Ibn Khaldun as a precursor of the social sciences; 3) Comparative studies between Ibn Khaldun and scholars of the western canon; 4) Broad survey of the ideas contained in the Muqaddima; 5) Epistemological and methodological aspects of Ibn Khaldun’s theory; 6) Theoretical critique and analysis; 7) The application of his theoretical framework to empirical situations.” He also states that “a glance at any extensive bibliography on Ibn Khaldun reveals that most work about him falls under the first four categories.”³⁹

**Graph 1:** Reception of Ibn Khaldun in early German-language sociology (created by Author)

Biographic elements

Rudolf Eisler, father of the famous composer Hanns Eisler, was born into a Jewish family in 1873 in Vienna, raised and educated in Prague and Paris, and died in 1926 in the city of his birth. He was secretary of the Sociological Society and was listed as an associate member of the International Institute of Sociology (IIS) in 1913.^a Despite his talent as both a philosopher and sociologist, he never obtained a professorship.

Wilhelm Jerusalem (born 1854 in Drenic, Bohemia; died 1923 in Vienna), son of a rabbi, had a traditional Jewish education. He had studied classical languages at the University of Prague where he also learned English and French, and obtained a PhD in history of the antiquity. Jerusalem obtained a habilitation in philosophy in 1903 and one in pedagogy in 1903 in Vienna. From 1920 onwards, he was a professor in those two disciplines in Vienna and published introductory books on empirical psychology and to philosophy. Jerusalem had introduced pragmatism to a European audience with the translation of William James’ Pragmatism (1908) and was open to empirical approaches. His work combined developmental, biological, psychological, and sociological perspectives. Jerusalem was one of the founding members of the Sociological Society in Vienna in 1907.^b

Franz Oppenheimer was born in 1864 in Berlin and died in 1943 in exile in Los Angeles. Son of a rabbi, he had practiced as a medical doctor before studying economics. He started teaching at University of Kiel where he became a professor in 1917. Oppenheimer was made first chair for sociology in Germany at Frankfurt in 1919. He was very active in the Zionist movement. The International Dictionary of Sociologists euphemistically states that Oppenheimer retired in 1929 and was a “visiting professor in various countries until his death” in 1943.^c In fact, aged 73, he emigrated to Japan with his daughter in 1939, where he was offered a lecturing post at Keio University, Tokyo, but was not allowed to teach because of diplomatic agreements between Japan and Nazi Germany. When Japan withdrew his residence permit, he was expulsed to Shanghai, the only harbor in the world where Jewish immigrants could flee without a visa between 1939 and 1941, and from there to the US in 1940, where he joined his sister in Los Angeles. In 1941, Oppenheimer was one of the founding members of the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, and until his death stayed active as a sociologist.^d

Hans Proesler was born in 1888 in Frankfurt and died in 1956 in Munich. After studying English literature, history, philosophy, and national economy, he obtained a PhD in 1916 and was appointed to the Handelshochschule Nürnberg, which he directed between 1928-1930. Between 1933 and 1946, he was forced out of his position, and could only return to his post at the then University for Economy and Social Sciences in Nürnberg after the Second World War. From 1947 to 1952, he acted again as its rector.

Ernst Grünfeld was born in 1883 in Brnó. He had studied Agriculture in Vienna and later state science (Staatswissenschaft) in Halle, where he obtained a PhD in 1908. He continued his studies in economy in Leipzig and Vienna. Between 1910 and 1912, he was an assistant in the Ostasiatisches Wirtschaftsarchiv der Südmandschurischen Eisenbahn AG in Tokyo. In 1913, he obtained a habilitation at University of Halle with a thesis on the harbor colonies in China. After fighting in the First World War for Austria, he started as a lecturer in Halle in 1919 and was appointed professor for economy (Volkswirtschaft) in the same university in 1922. In 1933, he was dismissed because of his Jewish origins and, for the same reason, his adoptive daughter was taken from him. He committed suicide in Berlin in 1938.^e

Fausto Squillace (1868-1935), an Italian sociologist, was initially educated in law. He first became interested in sociology while studying in Paris under René Worms, and later in Brussels.^f He wrote his sociological theories when he was professor at the Université Nouvelle in Brussels.

Ludwig Gumplowicz was born in 1838 in Cracow and died in 1909 in Graz. He belonged to an educated and wealthy Jewish family. After studying law and national economy (Nationalökonomie) in Cracow and Vienna from 1858 to 1861, he worked as a lawyer. He was also politically active as one of the founders and key actors of the radically democratic circle Kraj, which defended Polish autonomy against Russian, Prussian, and Austrian domination).^g Deeply disappointed by his political experience, he turned to academia. In 1875, he left Cracow and his former Jewish cultural environment and obtained a habilitation at University of Graz.^h In the same year, he converted to Protestantism. In 1875 as well, his first sociological work in German language, Rasse und Staat (Race and State), was published.ⁱ After lecturing in administrative science (Verwaltungslehre), Gumplowicz became extra-ordinary professor in 1882 and full professor of constitutional law (in German: Staatsrecht) in 1893. Although he hardly ever travelled abroad, Gumplowicz was one of the founding members of the International Institut of Sociology in 1893 and its vice-president in 1895. He knew not only Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, but also several spoken languages—German, Polish, English, French, and Italian, as well as several Slavic languages. He maintained lively correspondence and invited international guests to Graz, such as Lester Ward and Franz Oppenheimer. In 1908, Gumplowicz retired from his university post.^j Following serious illness, both Gumplowicz and his wife committed suicide in 1909.

Worms, 1913.
Brockard, 1975; Lieber, 1959, 247-248.
Miller, 1959, 421.
Caspari, Lichtblau, 2014; Willms, 2018.
Eberle, 2012.
Ferrarotti, 1980, 408.
Zebrowski, 1926, 9.
Savorgnan, 1928.
Gumplowicz, [1875] 1909.
Zebrowski, 1926, 5-17.

The reception process split up into two strands, the first of which was initiated by Eisler in 1903 (see graph 1; for biographic information on the authors, see the text box). Eisler followed a monist perspective, i.e., the belief that all reality is of one essential substance and governed by the same type of laws. He conceived of sociology as a fundamental discipline that would, through consideration of the results of the diverse social science disciplines, show the more general traits of society. Eisler had translated Fausto Squillace’s and Gustave Le Bon’s works,⁴⁰ which proves a certain openness of mind towards foreign contributions as well as language competencies. Out of Käsler’s list, he is the first, in chronological order, to mention Ibn Khaldun, although this is a minimal reference. In the “overview on sociological literature” included in the introduction to his Soziologie, we read: “Christian philosophy of the Middle Ages is poor in theoretical approaches to sociological problems.” Apart from Aquinas, Dante, Machiavelli, and Bodin, he mentioned “[t]he Arab Ibn Khaldun who lived in the 14th century” and who “emphasized already the dependency of society on its natural milieu.”⁴¹ Eisler did not include the source of his acquaintance with Ibn Khaldun. We may assume he knew of him through Squillace (see below) whose book Die soziologischen Theorien (Sociological theories) he had translated and published the year before.

Wilhelm Jerusalem made a similar reference. In his 1926 Introduction to Sociology, we find a footnote on Ibn Chaldun in the two-page section on the development of sociology during the Middle Ages:

We have to count into the period of the Middle Ages the Arab sociologist Ibn-Chaldun who lived in the 14th century. His introduction to history has been translated into French under the title Prolégomènes historiques d’Ibn-Chaldun in 1857. Ludwig Gumplowicz has highlighted the importance of this researcher in his Sociological Essays (1899), p 149 ff. and has given numerous extracts from his work. Ibn-Chaldun clearly recognized that the sociological structure of human societies depended on their surroundings, notably on the climate; he traced back the origin of the state to conquest and battle and investigated the conditions of the flourishing and fall of states; in doing so, he has anticipated very modern perspectives. A complete German translation of his works on the basis of the Arabic original that is found in Paris would be desirable.⁴²

The reference to Ibn Khaldun was of minor importance to Jerusalem’s work. Despite the fact that Jerusalem called him a sociologist, we can categorize it as “work on Ibn Khaldun as a precursor of the social sciences”, according to Alatas, since the reference remained without any connection to the remaining parts of this introduction to sociology and appeared here in the narrow context of periodization (Middle Ages). Several things are interesting to note, however: Jerusalem indicated the probably most important piece of reception in this phase, Gumplowicz’s essay on Ibn Khaldun (see below). The two topics mentioned with regard to Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddima included the question of the origin of the state, which proved to be the leading debate within which he was mobilized by the German scholarly community. Jerusalem shared certain characteristics with the other main actors of this reception, as we shall see.

The third author in chronological order is Proesler. He considered sociology to be a singular and fundamental discipline within the social sciences. Its aim would be to recognize the rules directing the world of the social. He also favored historical perspectives within sociology, in particular social history.⁴³ His Die Anfänge der Gesellschaftslehre (The origins of social doctrine) provided a historical overview on the development of the social sciences, at a moment when the time of sociology’s birth as well as the question of its “founding father” was still debated.⁴⁴ In the proper name index, we find two references to Ibn Khaldun. They are indirect references where Proesler summarized prior attempts to produce a history of the discipline. For instance, since the influence on the later social sciences of scholars who were sometimes considered to be their founding fathers “such as Ibn Chaldun or Vico” could not be confirmed, Grünfeld believed their history started only from the British moral philosophers of the 18th century.⁴⁵ This referred to Grünfeld’s attempt to reconstruct sociology before Lorenz von Stein.⁴⁶ Interestingly, Grünfeld’s PhD thesis Die Gesellschaftslehre von Lorenz von Stein (Lorenz von Stein’s social doctrine)⁴⁷ did not yet contain the chapters 3 through 5 of the 1910 reedition.⁴⁸ It is only in this second edition that he mentioned “the interesting figure of the Arab Ibn Khaldun”, that would need to be part “of an elaborate history of social theory” and who “had been pulled into the light only recently as one of the many precursors of a materialistic theory of history.”⁴⁹ In a footnote to Ibn Khaldun, Proesler also referenced Eisler’s Soziologie (1903). Furthermore, Proesler emphasized the role of Squillace, in “enlightening the development of sociology”, in particular with regard to “foreign literature”, a domain in which he continued to be considered “an authority”. In Squillace’s Die soziologischen Theorien,⁵⁰ the precursors of sociology reached from Plato and Aristotle to Dante, Ibn Chaldun and Machiavelli. He explained that he “extended into the past” the period of precursors to sociology as a consequence of “Gumplowicz’s discovery of an Arab sociologist of the 14th century.”⁵¹ Proesler concluded his overview on existing histories of sociology by dating “the origins of sociology, in the main, in the 18th century; we therefore start out our own endeavor from this point of time”.⁵² In choosing this timing, Proesler excluded Ibn Khaldun from his own considerations. Nevertheless, his book allowed me to identify two prior sources through which he had learned about Ibn Khaldun, texts that were not included in Käsler’s list—Grünfeld and Squillace.

So far, we can state that if Ibn Khaldun’s works were referred to, it was through the French translation of the Muqaddima by Slane. Eisler, Jerusalem, Proesler, Grünfeld and Squillace, acknowledged “Ibn Khaldun as a precursor of the social sciences.”⁵³ Proesler’s contribution to the reception of Ibn Khaldun proved to be a sort of “dead end”. However, these authors also pointed out another participant in his reception to whom we shall turn below: Ludwig Gumplowicz. He seems to be the key to Oppenheimer’s reception of Ibn Khaldun.

Ibn Khaldun and the sociological theory of the state

The second strand of reception occurred within a specific theoretical framework, namely the sociological theory of the state. The significance of Ibn Khaldun within this field, according to our enquiry, was revealed by Oppenheimer. System der Soziologie (System of sociology) is a multivolume publication that presents a general sociology as a common basis for all social sciences; a theory of development; and specialized sociologies: sociology of the economy, of law, of the state, as well as pedagogy or applied organizational sociology. Atypical for a German approach, that of Oppenheimer conceived sociology as a historically grounded universal science: the social whole, human development and history as such form its object.⁵⁴

Ibn Khaldun came into play in relationship with Oppenheimer’s theory of the state, which was similar to Gumplowicz’s sociological idea of the state but more elaborate and sophisticated (see below). For Oppenheimer, the main driving force of historical progress was the “political means” (politisches Mittel), i.e., the striving of social groups to satisfy their needs not by their own work (the “economic means”, ökonomisches Mittel), but by the subjugation, domination, and exploitation of other groups. This was an argument against the materialist law of primitive accumulation, according to which class divides emerged endogenously, and against the juridical idea of social contract: “The rise of the state was not intratribal; it arose neither through economic differentiation nor through heroic bravery or heroic cunning, neither through legitimate use nor through illegitimate misuse of the power of office bestowed on such heroes; the formation of the state was intertribal—it came about through the subjugation of one group by another.”⁵⁵ Peasant societies were conquered by nomads or pirates, and out of conquest developed social stratification and, ultimately, the state. This approach directly built on Gumplowicz’s “sociological state theory”. Oppenheimer ideal-typically defined various stages of state development in an evolutionary model (not a unilinear, simplistic stage model), the motor of development being class struggle. The model was based on historical and ethnographic research, and it made a universalist claim.

Within this framework, Ibn Khaldun was only one source alongside many others, and he was referred to only through secondary literature: Gumplowicz’s Geschichte der Staatstheorien (History of state theories) (1905); his Soziologische Essays (Sociological essays) (1898); as well as Eduard Meyer’s Elemente der Anthropologie (Elements of anthropology) (1884). It is noteworthy that the more elaborate parts on Ibn Khaldun appeared in volume II of the System der Soziologie, dedicated to the state. However Oppenheimer presented Gumplowicz as the ground-breaking pioneer of state theory. And yet, the sociological idea of the state had always come up when the state got into conflict with other powers, as in the works of François Hotman, Charles Hall, Gerrard Winstanley, William Everard, or the Abbé Sieyès. Oppenheimer then wrote on Ibn Khaldun:

Many years earlier an unbiased and highly regarded historian and sociologist had already expressed this, purely in the interests of scientific knowledge, as the simple truth, which indeed it is; moreover it is a truth which could never have been hidden if philosophical ideas of the ahistorical state, and juridical ideas of the non-historical state, had not continually distorted and corrupted the historical ideas of the state as it is in reality.⁵⁶

Later on, he counted Ibn Khaldun amongst the precursors, creators or completers of the sociological idea of the state, alongside Hotman, Winstanley, Sieyès, Saint-Simon, Comte, Gumplowicz, and Gustav Ratzenhofer.⁵⁷

Ibn Khaldun was mentioned again in the more historical volume IV, in the section on the Middle Ages. It contains a few paragraphs on the Arabic empires:

For Ibn Chaldûn, a well-to-do Moor, born in Tunis in 1332 […], it is palpably obvious how states come into being: all around him victorious tribes of nomads—in Africa and Spain the Arabs, in Asia the Mongols—rule over the alien peoples they have conquered, ruthlessly oppressed and economically exploited. Here the ethnic and linguistic merging that had taken place in Western and Southern Europe and which created the illusion of an original unity did not (yet) exist. So, Ibn Chaldûn writes, briefly and concisely, in his celebrated “Introduction to Historical Science”: “States arise through conquest […]; once the land has been seized, the followers of the new dynasty, the victorious tribe, must spread over the whole land and occupy the castles in the individual provinces.”⁵⁸

An overview on Oppenheimer’s works shows that Ibn Khaldun was by no means the starting point of theorization on the state. We do not find any reference to him in an earlier publication, Der Staat (The state)⁵⁹, which already contained the full elaboration of Oppenheimer’s theory. The main reference here was the human geographer Friedrich Ratzel and his ethnographic material. As with Gumplowicz’s work (see below), we have to assume a post-hoc addition of Ibn Khaldun as an early representative of the “right” theory of the state.

We can categorize Oppenheimer’s reception not only as a work on “Ibn Khaldun as a precursor of the social sciences”, but also as “theoretical critique and analysis”, in Alatas’ typology. Oppenheimer did not merely mention him in an encyclopedic endeavor to present a complete overview on precursors of sociology, but as a representative and contributor to a theoretical approach which, Oppenheimer believed, they both shared. Ibn Khaldun was mobilized within the framework of a scholarly debate that was ongoing amongst European sociologists at the time, and whose key representative contributed the key text to his reception in the period in question: Ludwig Gumplowicz.

Most commentators on Gumplowicz’s life and academic career interpret his scholarly interests as an abstraction from personal experiences: the marginality of his status as a Jew as a factor favoring his sociological sensitivities, his disappointment with the Polish national struggle as enhancing scholarly pessimism, the multi-ethnic environment of the Habsburg monarchy favoring a political theory of race struggles, and his and his son’s activist experiences as sharpening his sociological views on state domination.⁶⁰

Gumplowicz’s Der Rassenkampf. Soziologische Untersuchungen (Race struggle. Sociological essays),⁶¹ a revision of his Rassenkampf of 1875, was the first German book that carried “sociology” in the title. Despite his Jewish-Polish origins and his juridical formation, Gumplowicz counts among the founding generation of German-language sociology.⁶² At the same time, however, his sociological views met a lot of resistance: as outlined in the introduction to the historical context, sociology as a discipline had a difficult start within the Germanophone countries. Gumplowicz, in addition, was trained in law and taught constitutional law. His sociological perspective was a serious challenge to his own craft. Also, his scientific views, based on his strict monism, ran counter the catholic-conservative, the liberal bourgeois as well as critical materialist positions.⁶³ It is through his following publication, Grundriß der Sociologie (Outline of sociology),⁶⁴ that Gumplowicz appeared in Käsler’s list. However, this is not yet the work that made it possible to him as a participant in the reception of Ibn Khaldun—his foundation of the discipline of sociology went without this reference.

In order to understand his key role in the reception of Ibn Khaldun, we need to trace with more detail the development of his lifetime interest in the origins of the state, or what he calls the sociological theory of the state. In his 1883 Rasse und Staat (Race and state), Gumplowicz laid its groundwork:

The conclusion to be drawn from the phenomena discussed here can only be that the encounter of different races and tribes represents the first impulse and the natural cause of the formation of states, and furthermore that the merging and gradual levelling out of the various racial differences that occur, amid painful struggles, alongside the development of the state are the natural cause of intellectual development, culture and civilization. This conclusion leads us, however, to lay down a law of the formation of states, which we would first formulate in negative form: Without racial differences there can be no state and no state development, and without racial merging there can be no culture and no civilization.⁶⁵

This is the sociological, as opposed to the juridical concept of the state. The first argues that the state is the result of conquest, i.e., of political violence, and that this origin grounds class differences within society, where political violence gradually develops into political domination.⁶⁶ The second apprehends the state in the perspective of natural justice, following Rousseau, where the state is seen as a creation of law and contract.⁶⁷

Clearly, the empirical background and personal experience against which he had elaborated his state theory was Polish history, including its fate under Habsburg rule, and he made references to Polish historians’ works.⁶⁸ However, Gumplowicz, as a strictly scientific mind, was confronted with a fundamental methodological problem here: he could not provide empirical evidence of his assumption of the initial creation of states, neither could he date nor locate it historically. His solution to this problem was unexpectedly creative. What followed in the text was a fictitious narration, showing considerable poetic talent, on how he imagined this first racial struggle leading to the creation of the first state to have happened. It ended as follows:

Thus the first struggle over a fine piece of land erupts—and the first hour of history strikes! […] And the first struggle ends with the first defeat of the weaker race, with the first victories for the more powerful human tribe. One was defeated and the other became dominant. With the first instance of domination the first state begins—the first nation comes into being. The sweat of the subject race, now condemned to slavery, is the dew that fertilizes the first seeds of civilization!⁶⁹

Gumplowicz further developed the debate on the juridical idea of the state versus his sociological idea of the state in his 1892 Die soziologische Staatsidee (The sociological idea of the state). Only the second edition of this book, with an augmented bibliography, finally rewards our search for references to Ibn Khaldun: “If Montesquieu was more successful than Ferguson, the latter’s book is of higher value. One can consider it to be the first natural history of human society and Ferguson to be the first sociologist.” Different from the first edition, Gumplowicz added a footnote: “At least in Europe. For the Arab Orient, it is Ibn Chaldun who merits this designation. See my Sociological Essays […].”⁷⁰ It was in the course of continuous elaboration of his sociological theory of the state, that Gumplowicz had come across Ibn Khaldun’s work. He commented on it at length in an essay first published in Polish,⁷¹ then in German,⁷² and later translated into French as well.⁷³ This essay, as we found out above, had been influential for Squillace, Jerusalem and Oppenheimer, and it drew on the translation by de Slane as well as on von Kremer’s report. It is the key piece in the puzzle of the reception of Ibn Khaldun in early German-language sociology. Let us have a closer look at this essay: what did Gumplowicz say about Ibn Khaldun?

The essay starts out from the observed division, within sociology, between proponents of a biological, organicist method (Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Albert Schäffle, Paul von Lilienfeld, Papala-Vadale, Guillaume de Greef, René Worms) on the one hand and representatives of an ethnological and historical positivistic approach (Adolf Bastian, H. Post, Charles Letourneau, Gabriel Tarde, Michelangelo Vaccaro, Gustave Le Bon, Émile Durkheim, Gustav Ratzenhofer) on the other hand. It mentioned the debates around the method of sociology at four International Congresses in Paris—certainly referring to the congresses of the International Institute of Sociology (IIS). At the 1897 Congress, said Gumplowicz, the majority was for the biological approach, taking society as an organism and sociology as the discipline studying the functions of that organism. This is the context in which Gumplowicz mobilized Ibn Khaldun, against the majority view held at the IIS:

Since none of these biological and sociological reflections can convince me, and American so-called sociology, with its moralizing and its obsession with ethical-social questions, does not appeal to me, I will try once more to justify my view on the subject of sociology. Such a justification may be undertaken in two different ways. One way is to provide evidence that, as I claim, such interactions between social elements do actually take place, that they have had an important role to play in human development and that in their essence they have not been sufficiently recognized or valued. Such evidence would be very difficult to find, since it would demand an account of the entire history of mankind from the sociological point of view. However, such historical evidence may in part be replaced by evidence from literary history if reference is made to the fact that there have always been thinkers who have seen in such interaction of social and ethnic groups the principal driving force of social and political development. Such evidence from literary history will, it is true, by no means replace historical evidence, if only because it calls for a belief in authority that has no justification in science, yet it will replace purely historical evidence to the extent that, in the end, such thinkers base their thought upon the observation of historical facts. At the same time, however, such evidence from literary history will convince us that the sociological theory regarding the interaction of social and ethnic groups as the principal driver of historical development is not a new theory, but that thinkers of all ages have always known of its existence from their observations of social and political life [...].⁷⁴

He continued:

I myself made this discovery in a work by Ibn Khaldun, a hitherto little-known Arab writer, totally overlooked by scholars of constitutional law, entitled Introduction to Historical Science [footnote: It appeared in French translation in the Notices et extraits des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Impériale, tome XIX, and is entitled: Prolegomènes historiques d’Ibn Khaldun, Paris 1857. The translation is by Slane. Kremer also wrote on this work in the Sitzungsberichte der Wiener Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1879]. The work contains […] general reflections on the philosophy of history, which may be described as sociological in the narrowest sense of the word […].⁷⁵

He went on to summarise the Muqaddima: Ibn Khaldun originally distinguished three types of peoples: nomads, half-wild people and tribally organized people. He explained differences between peoples through different influences related to their environment, such as the climate, that forces people to adapt to different lifeways. Ibn Khaldun, in recognizing the socio-economic differences between people, “is thus far from committing the same errors as the authors of European enlightenment of the 18th century, who see the true, normal ‘natural state’ of humans only in the ‘Naturmensch’ [child of nature, primitive man].”⁷⁶ Gumplowicz acknowledged that for Ibn Khaldun not only environments accounted for differences, but also differences in lifestyle, or socialization, as a “second nature”.

The different types of humans—peasants, nomads and inhabitants of cities—were the elements that entered into relationship with one another and thus gave rise to the foundation of states. More precisely, according to Ibn Khaldun, the nomads were the founders of states. His views corresponded to modern realism, for example when he defined the state as a community of humans emerging out of “imperiousness and eagerness for power.”⁷⁷ For Gumplowicz, such views demonstrated that the monistic perspective that he himself defended reached back into much more ancient literature, since Ibn Khaldun, according to him, also applied the same types of laws that he found in nature to human society. For instance, he considered the general law governing animal societies to be of the same nature as those of human societies, and he recognized that all creatures and types, including humans, were bound to decay.⁷⁸

Gumplowicz’s later work, Geschichte der Staatstheorien (History of state theories), published in 1905, included a similar kind of appreciation:

If we are searching for 14th century knowledge on the essence of the state of a deeper nature than what the Roman-Christian cultural development had produced up to this time, we need to turn towards the Arab-Muslim cultural world that reached, from the 8th century onwards, from Asia Minor to North Africa and Spain. There, we encounter in the second half of the 14th century a historian and politician who grants us deep insights into the social nature of the state, only comparable to those that the new science of society (sociology) has opened up in Europe, in the 19th century.⁷⁹

Gumplowicz concluded this section on Ibn Khaldun within the framework of the history of state theories as follows:

Those few sentences from Ibn Chaldun suffice to illustrate the world of difference between the rather realistic views and knowledge of this Arab as opposed to the wry notions of European scholasticism, that ensnared even such an excellent mind as Dante’s. In Ibn Chaldun, we find a true observation of political and social facts, and conclusions following logically and soberly from them; in Dante, we find argumentations, grounded in the Bible and in the views of the clergy and moving in scholastic forms, that are alienated from all reality and life.⁸⁰

Gumplowicz’s interest in the Muqaddima was twofold. First, Ibn Khaldun was relevant for him because he confirmed the sociological theory of the state. Ibn Khaldun’s conflict theory on the origin and fall of empires and his observations on the encounter of different population groups were largely congruent with Gumplowicz’s.⁸¹ Gumplowicz pushed the resemblances further in finding indices for a monistic worldview as well as for his polygenism-thesis, two core ideas of his own works, in Ibn Khaldun. Second, the Muqaddima allowed Gumplowicz to broaden the empirical basis of historical evidence on which his state-theory could build. Remember that Gumplowicz at first had to rely on fiction in order to illustrate the origin of the state. Interestingly here, he took Ibn Khaldun for a particularly reliable source. For example, Ibn Khaldun’s observations about the conquering tribes, i.e., the nomads, were interesting “especially when we take into account that the author lived not long after the foundations of the great states that formed the basis for our current European system of states.”⁸² It is because Ibn Khaldun was historically closer to the moment of state formation that his oeuvre was compelling for Gumplowicz. We similarly find this idea that Ibn Khaldun was a reliable reference because, as a scholar and politician, he was so close to events at the time that he could “grab it with his hands”, in Oppenheimer’s account.⁸³ Von Kremer, to whose comment on the Muqaddima Gumplowicz referred, had already anticipated this reading of Ibn Khaldun as an author who had lived through a historical period, who had participated in its political events, and who had provided an observation-based analysis of it.⁸⁴

Gumplowicz put forth a similar argument when he summarized Ibn Khaldun’s recommendations for conquering and securing rule, which he found similar to the contemporary Polish historian Franciszek Piekosinski:

It seems, then, that Ibn Khaldun must have heard about and known how conquering tribes protect their spoils. Indeed, it is quite possible that he possessed more accurate information about the foundation of the states of Northern Europe than we do today, as thanks to the systematic eradication and destruction of the evidence, we are deprived of any and every accredited testimony to such events, and are forced to rely on false and tendentious reports by monastic chroniclers […].⁸⁵

The distant colleague was thus closer to the time and a more reliable source than the chronicles of European monasteries. This is an interesting argument, since Ibn Khaldun himself founded his own historical method on a critique of chronicles—it is as if Gumplowicz had taken up Ibn Khaldun’s methodological argument, discrediting many of the sources of European history.

This reading of an author from a distant place and from a different historical context is challenging when we think of the ubiquitous critique that sociologists today voice against one another or against the classics: that this theory is imported from elsewhere and is therefore irrelevant to our context. Much to the contrary, the historical South-North circulation analyzed here makes the case that a given author context is a source of reliability of his views. It is because he lived long ago and far away, that his views, similar to Gumplowicz’s, were deemed to be true.

What has happened to the legacy of Gumplowicz’s reception of Ibn Khaldun in the meantime? Many commentators on his life and oeuvre considered Gumplowicz a marginal, if not a failed figure even during his lifetime, at least within German-speaking academia. At the same time, colleagues from abroad valued his contribution to sociology, and his works had been translated into English, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Polish and Japanese during his lifetime.⁸⁶ When he passed away, we read, the news of his death “filled the entire civilized world with reverent awe”⁸⁷ and “without fail, he would occupy an honorable position within the history of sociology.”⁸⁸

The above section outlined that the only heir of the connection between Ibn Khaldun and Gumplowicz within the framework of state theory was Oppenheimer, who can be considered the most important successor and interpreter of Gumplowicz’s sociological theory of the state.⁸⁹ Together with his assistant Gottfried Salomon, Franco Savorgnan and Max Adler, he edited selected works of Gumplowicz,⁹⁰ which indicates the closeness or connection between Gumplowicz and this second important author with regard to the reception of Ibn Khaldun. When Oppenheimer was named the first chair for sociology at a German university in 1919, Gumplowicz had been dead for ten years. Oppenheimer’s approach to the state was directly grounded in Gumplowicz’s, even if it criticized Gumplowicz’s monistic attitude, his purely pessimistic take on law as a form of domination, and the terminology of race was replaced by that of class. Different from others who mentioned Gumplowicz’s contribution to state theory without referring to Ibn Khaldun,⁹¹ Oppenheimer continued, with Gumplowicz, to hand down this legacy. Oppenheimer’s ideas about the state exerted further influence in the US after his emigration, as well as elsewhere.⁹²

Conclusion: a lost legacy

This article started out from the claim that Ibn Khaldun had been marginalized or silenced in the history of sociology, of which he could be considered, and indeed is considered by some proponents, to be the founder. This article provided an analysis of the reception of Ibn Khaldun in the founding phase of German-language sociology. It confirms that the reception was quantitatively rather negligible. It was, however, interesting for our understanding of reception processes as such, and provided a challenging historical background to current debates around the highly distorted South-North relations within the discipline.

The active participants in his reception share a few characteristics. They occupied particular positions and defended views that might seem unconventional given the mainstream history of German social sciences. This study could therefore contribute to the recent critical revisions of the established history of German sociology.⁹³ None of them followed the tradition today considered as “typically German”, i.e., the comprehensive approaches that go back to Wilhelm Dilthey’s proposition. Most of them were Jews, if not sons of rabbis. My prior work on the reception of Émile Durkheim in German-language sociology⁹⁴ had already identified Jewish academics as being strongly represented in this reception of the French foundational program, and indeed, several of the most salient figures of Durkheim’s reception appear here again as participants in Ibn Khaldun’s reception (Oppenheimer, Jerusalem). This statement has to be relativized to the extent that Jews were overrepresented within the discipline as a whole. Käsler⁹⁵ and René König⁹⁶ for Germany and Torrance⁹⁷ for Austria have discussed why so many early German sociologists came from a Jewish background. Their assumptions, in sum, turn around the idea of a marginal status or as embodying the alterity of European modern identity, which would have predisposed them to take a distanced stance towards society, to develop a particular sensitivity to social questions and an “oppositional identity.”⁹⁸ This would confer upon their viewpoint a sort of epistemic advantage over mainstream society to develop critical scholarship. We need to keep in mind, however, the critical discussion of the commonly held view that exiled academics and “hybrid” intellectuals have a special epistemic position.⁹⁹ The few scholars who partook in Ibn Khaldun’s reception seemed to have a certain openness towards intellectual developments beyond the German realm. They read and published in several languages; Jerusalem and Gumplowicz had translated scholarly literature; Eisler, Jerusalem, Oppenheimer, Proesler, Grünfeld and Gumplowicz had worked or studied in different locations. For Gumplowicz and Squillace, German was not even their mother tongue. Vienna clearly appeared as a center of this reception process, which opens up the horizon towards the Habsburg empire and thus also to Eastern European experiences, where Ibn Khaldun’s thoughts on ethnic conflict and conquering tribes seemed to resonate in peculiar ways. Apart from that, Jerusalem, Squillace, Eisler and Gumplowicz maintained contacts with France, not least through involvement in the International Institute of Sociology, and could read the French translation of the Muqaddima.

If we look beyond the actor level into the texts that partook in Ibn Khaldun’s reception, it appeared that there was some genuine interest not in his overall work, not in the foundational program that could have been mobilized in the course of the foundation and institutionalization of sociology, but in certain theoretical contributions, especially with regard to state theory. If there was interest in the Muqaddima, it was genuinely theoretically motivated. However, Ibn Khaldun cannot be claimed to be the founder of the sociological theory of the state, since Gumplowicz, the main actor in the reception process, as well as Oppenheimer, had elaborated their theory in fundamentally congruent ways, but independently of Ibn Khaldun. Ibn Khaldun was a post-hoc addition to an ongoing debate. Different from current debates, the authors of the time were not interested in Ibn Khaldun as a scholar “of the South”, or as someone to include in order to broaden the scope of the discipline. What was significant was his empirical closeness to historical realities to which European historical sociologists had no direct access.

Interestingly, from the perspective of processes of canonization, scholars all over the world have been recovering Ibn Khaldun and his legacy in a determined strategy to broaden the canon, to diversify the range of our classics, and to make his sociology relevant beyond his time. The same cannot be said of Gumplowicz and Oppenheimer. Both have been lost in the legacy of the discipline. In the case of Gumplowicz, even his grave in Matzleinsdorfer cemetery in Vienna does not exist anymore and his works are not easily accessible. He “is hardly quoted and less read” and his life and work are considered a “failed attempt at becoming a classic.”¹⁰⁰ If Gumplowicz and Oppenheimer were important readers of Ibn Khaldun during the foundational phase, they could not ensure that Ibn Khaldun would continue to be viewed as a significant figure throughout the years into the present within German-language sociology. Why this was so shall be the topic of a follow-up article.

Appendix

Käsler, D., 1984, “Liste von ‘Lehrbüchern’ der Soziologie im Bereich der deutschen Soziologie 1909-1934” (“List of ‘textbooks’ of sociology in the field of German sociology 1909-1934”), Die frühe deutsche Soziologie 1909 bis 1934 und ihre Entstehungs-Milieus, Opladen, Westdeutscher Verlag, appendix 10, p. 613-617

The books containing references to Ibn Khaldun are highlighted and have an asterisk (*) in front of the author's name in the first column. Books that have not been checked for references are marked in bold. The final bibliography to this article contains only those publications that are discussed in the main text.

Author	Publ. year	Title	Publ. place	Publisher
Abramowitsch, Mark	1930	Hauptprobleme der Soziologie	Berlin/ Paderborn	Courier/ Sarastro
Achelis, Thomas	[1899] 1912	Soziologie	Leipzig/ Berlin	Göschen
Andrei, Petre	1927	Das Problem der Methode in der Soziologie	Leipzig	Otto Harrassowitz
Barth, Paul	[1897] 1922	Die Philosophie der Geschichte als Soziologie	Leipzig	Reisland
Brinkmann, Carl	1919	Versuch einer Gesellschaftswissenschaft	Munich	Duncker & Humblot
Brinkmann, Carl	1925	Gesellschaftslehre	Berlin	Springer
Dunkmann, Karl ; Lehmann, Gerhardt ; Sauermann, Heinz	1931	Lehrbuch der Soziologie und Sozialphilosophie	Berlin	Junker & Dünnhaupt
*Eisler, Rudolf	1903	Soziologie. Die Lehre von der Entstehung und Entwicklung der menschlichen Gesellschaft	Leipzig	Weber
Eleutheropulos, Abroteles	[1904] 1923	Soziologie	Jena	Fischer
Freyer, Hans	1930	Soziologie als Wirklichkeitswissenschaft	Leipzig/ Berlin	Teubner
Freyer, Hans	1931	Einleitung in die Soziologie	Leipzig	Quelle & Meyer
Gumplowicz, Ludwig	[1885] 1905	Grundriss der Soziologie	Vienna	Manzsche
Jerusalem, Franz Wilhelm	1930	Grundzüge der Soziologie	Berlin	Spaeth & Linde
*Jerusalem, Wilhelm	1926	Einführung in die Soziologie	Vienne/ Leipzig	Wilhelm Braumüller
Kracauer, Siegfried	[1922] 2006	Soziologie als Wissenschaft	Frankfurt am Main	Suhrkamp
Landshut, Siegfried	1929	Kritik der Soziologie	Munich/ Leipzig	Duncker & Humblot
Mannheim, Karl	[1929] 1952	Ideologie und Utopie	Frankfurt am Main	Schulte-Bulmke
Mannheim, Karl	1932	Die Gegenwartsaufgaben der Soziologie	Tübingen	Mohr
Michels, Robert	1926	Soziologie als Gesellschaftswissenschaft	Berlin	Mauritius-Verlag
Neurath, Otto	1931	Empirische Soziologie. Der wissenschaftliche Gehalt der Geschichte und Nationalökonomie	Vienna	Springer
Oppenheimer, Franz	[1910] 1923	System der Soziologie, vol. III/1	Jena	Gustav Fischer
Oppenheimer, Franz	1922	System der Soziologie, vol. I/1	Jena	Gustav Fischer
Oppenheimer, Franz	1923	System der Soziologie, vol. I/2	Jena	Gustav Fischer
Oppenheimer, Franz	1924	System der Soziologie, vol. III/2	Jena	Gustav Fischer
*Oppenheimer, Franz	1926	System der Soziologie, vol. II	Jena	Gustav Fischer
Oppenheimer, Franz	1929	System der Soziologie, vol. IV/1	Jena	Gustav Fischer
*Oppenheimer, Franz	1933	System der Soziologie, vol. IV/2	Jena	Gustav Fischer
Oppenheimer, Franz	1935	System der Soziologie, vol. IV/3	Jena	Gustav Fischer
Oppenheimer, Franz ; Salomon, Gottfried	1926	Soziologische Lesestücke	Karlsruhe	Braun
Pieper, Josef	1933	Grundformen sozialer Spielregeln	Freiburg im Breisgau	Herder
*Proesler, Hans	1935	Die Anfänge der Gesellschaftslehre	Erlangen	Palm & Enke
Ratzenhofer, Gustav	1898	Die sociologische Erkenntnis	Leipzig	Brockhaus
Ratzenhofer, Gustav	1907	Soziologie. Positive Lehre von den menschlichen Wechselbeziehungen	Leipzig	Brockhaus
Rosenstock, Eugen	1925	Soziologie I. Die Kräfte der Gemeinschaft	Berlin/ Leipzig	Walter de Gruyter
Rumpf, Max	1931	Deutsche Volkssoziologie im Rahmen einer sozialen Lebenslehre	Nuremberg	Krische
Sander, Fritz	1930	Allgemeine Gesellschaftslehre	Jena	Gustav Fischer
Schäffle, Albert	1906	Abriss der Soziologie	Tübingen	Laupp’schen Buchhandlung
Scherrer, Hans	1914	Grundsätze und Gesetze der Soziologie	Leipzig	O. Hillmann
Schmidt-Warneck, Fedor von	1889	Die Soziologie im Umrisse ihrer Grundprinzipien	Brunswick	Selbstverlag
Simmel, Georg	[1908] 1992	Soziologie	Frankfurt am Main	Suhrkamp
Sombart, Werner	1923	Soziologie	Berlin	Rolf Heise
Sombart, Werner	1930	Nationalökonomie und Soziologie	Jena	Gustav Fischer
Spann, Othmar	[1914] 1969	Gesellschaftslehre	Graz	Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt
Stein, Ludwig	1898	Wesen und Aufgaben der Soziologie	Berlin	Reimer
Stein, Ludwig	1921	Einführung in die Soziologie	Munich	Rösl & Cie
Stoltenberg, Hans L.	1937	Geschichte der deutschen Gruppwissenschaft (Soziologie) mit bes. Beachtung ihres Wortschatzes	Leipzig	Hans Buske
Tönnies, Ferdinand	[1887] 1935	Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft	Leipzig	Hans Buske
Tönnies, Ferdinand	1931	Einführung in die Soziologie	Stuttgart	Ferdinand Enke
Vierkandt, Alfred	1923	Gesellschaftslehre	Stuttgart	Ferdinand Enke
Weber, Max	[1922] 1947	Grundriss der Sozialökonomik	Tübingen	Mohr (Paul Siebeck)
Wiese, Leopold von	1924	Allgemeine Soziologie als Lehre von den Beziehungen und Beziehungsgebilden der Menschen, Teil I, Beziehunglehre	Munich/ Leipzig	Duncker & Humblot
Wiese, Leopold von	1929	Allgemeine Soziologie als Lehre von den Beziehungen und Beziehungsgebilden der Menschen, Teil II, Gebildelehre	Munich/ Leipzig	Duncker & Humblot
Wiese, Leopold von	[1926] 1960	Soziologie	Berlin	Walter de Gruyter
Wiese, Leopold von	1933	System der allgemeinen Soziologie als Lehre von den sozialen Prozessen und den sozialen Gebilden der Menschen (Beziehungslehre)	Munich/ Leipzig	Duncker & Humblot

Bibliography

Abdesselem, A., 1983, Ibn Khaldoun et ses lecteurs, Paris, Presses universitaires de France.

Aillet, C., 2016, “Violence et pacification, genèse et mort de l’État. Deux relectures contemporaines d’Ibn Khaldūn”, Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée, 139, p. 251-257.

Alatas, S. F., 2014, Applying Ibn Khaldun. The Recovery of a Lost Tradition in Sociology, London/New York, Routledge.

Alatas, S. F., 2014, Ibn Khaldun, New Delhi, Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies/Oxford University Press.

Ayad, M. K., 1930a, Die Geschichts- und Gesellschaftslehre Ibn Haldūns, Stuttgart/Berlin, Cotta’sche Buchhandlung.

Ayad, M. K., 1930b, Die Bedingungen und Triebkräfte des geschichtlichen Geschehens in Ibn Haldûns Geschichtslehre, inaugural thesis for the title of doctor, Berlin, Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität.

Becker, H., Smelo, L., 1931, “Conflict Theories of the Origin of the State”, The Sociological Review, 23 (2), p. 65-79.

Ben Saad, M., 2008, “Ibn Khaldun et la génération des êtres vivants. Réception des textes et traductions françaises”, Bulletin d’histoire et d’épistémologie des sciences de la vie, 15 (1), p. 73-110, DOI: https://doi.org/10.3917/bhesv.151.0073 (accessed 03/09/2022).

Bernsdorf, W., 1980, “Eisler, Rudolf”, in Bernsdorf, W., Knospe, H. (eds.), Internationales Soziologenlexikon, vol. 1, Beiträge über bis Ende 1969 verstorbene Soziologen, , 2nd ed., Stuttgart, Ferdinand Enke, p. 111.

Brix, E., 1986a, “Der gescheiterte Versuch, ein Klassiker zu werden”, in Brix, E. (ed.), Monographien zur österreichischen Kultur- und Geistesgeschichte. Ludwig Gumplowicz oder die Gesellschaft als Natur, Vienna/Cologne/Graz, H. Böhlaus Nachf., p. 45-57.

Brix, E., 1986b, “Die fröhliche Resignation”, in Brix, E. (ed.), Monographien zur österreichischen Kultur- und Geistesgeschichte. Ludwig Gumplowicz oder die Gesellschaft als Natur, Vienna/Cologne/Graz, H. Böhlaus Nachf., p. 13-20.

Brix, E., 1986c, “Ein Leben am Rande”, in Brix, E. (ed.), Monographien zur österreichischen Kultur- und Geistesgeschichte. Ludwig Gumplowicz oder die Gesellschaft als Natur, Vienna/Cologne/Graz, H. Böhlaus Nachf., p. 21-44.

Brix, E., 1986d, “Ludwig Gumplowicz : der skeptische Teil der Moderne”, in Brix, E. (ed.), Monographien zur österreichischen Kultur- und Geistesgeschichte. Ludwig Gumplowicz oder die Gesellschaft als Natur, Vienna/Cologne/Graz, H. Böhlaus Nachf., p. 9-12.

Brockard, H., 1975, “Jerusalem, Wilhelm”, in Neue Deutsche Biographie, vol. 10, Hufeland – Kaffsack, Berlin, Duncker & Humblot, p. 418.

Caspari, V., Lichtblau, K., 2014, Franz Oppenheimer. Ökonom und Soziologe der ersten Stunde, Frankfurt am Main, Societäts-Verlag.

Dozy, R., 1869, “Prolégomènes d’Ibn Khaldoun, texte arabe publié, d’après les manuscrits de la Bibliothèque impériale, par M. Quatremère. Paris, 1858. 3 volumes in-4 […] ; Prolégomènes d’Ibn Khaldoun, traduits en français et commentés par M. de Slane, membre de l’institut. Paris, 1863-1868. 3 volumes in-4 […]”, Journal asiatique, 13, p. 133-218.

Eberle, H., 2012, “Ernst Grünfeld”, in Catalogus Professorum Halensis 1918-1933, Martin-Luther-Universität, URL: http://www.catalogus-professorum-halensis.de/gruenfeldernst.html (accessed 03/09/2022).

Eisler, R., 1903, Soziologie. Die Lehre von der Entstehung und Entwicklung der menschlichen Gesellschaft, Leipzig, Weber.

Exenberger, A., 2001, “Ibn Halduns ‘Buch der Beispiele’ oder: Jeder kulturelle Hintergrund ist in der Lage, Großes hervorzubringen”, Concilium medii aevi, 4, p. 99-131.

Ferrarotti, F., 1980, “Fausto Squillace”, in Bernsdorf, W., Knospe, H. (eds.), Internationales Soziologenlexikon, vol. 1, Beiträge über bis Ende 1969 verstorbene Soziologen, 2nd ed., Stuttgart, Ferdinand Enke, p. 408.

Feuerhahn, W., 2014, “La sociologie avec ou sans guillemets”, Les Cahiers philosophiques de Strasbourg, 35, p. 157-196.

Frank, H., 1884, Beitrag zur Erkenntnis des Sufismus nach Ibn Haldun, inaugural thesis for the title of doctor, Leipzig, W. Drugulin.

Gella, A., 1971, “Introduction”, in Gella, A. (ed.), The Ward-Gumplowicz Correspondence: 1897-1909, New York, Essay Press, p. xiii-xxviii.

Goetze, D., 1969, Die Staatstheorie von Ludwig Gumplowicz, inaugural thesis for the title of doctor, Heidelberg, Ruprecht-Karl-Universität Heidelberg.

Grünfeld, E., 1908, Die Gesellschaftslehre von Lorenz von Stein, inaugural thesis for the title of doctor, Halle, Hohen Philosophischen Fakultät der Vereinigten Friedrichs-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Halle, Druck von C. A. Kaemmerer.

Grünfeld, E., [1908] 1910, Lorenz von Stein und die Gesellschaftslehre, Jena, Gustav Fischer.

Gülich, C., 1992, “Le rôle de la coopération scientifique internationale dans la constitution de la sociologie en Europe (1890-1914)”, in Lécuyer, B.-P., Matalon, B. (eds.), Les débuts des sciences de l’homme, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, p. 105-116.

Gumplowicz, L., [1875] 1909, “Rasse und Staat”, Der Rassenkampf. Soziologische Untersuchungen, 2nd ed. revised with appendix, Innsbruck, Wagner, p. 347-393.

Gumplowicz, L., [1883] 1909, Der Rassenkampf. Soziologische Untersuchungen, 2nd ed. revised with appendix, Innsbruck, Wagner.

Gumplowicz, L., [1885] 1905, Grundriß der Soziologie, Vienna, Manzsche.

Gumplowicz, L., [1892] 1902, Die sociologische Staatsidee, 2nd increased ed., Innsbruck, Wagner.

Gumplowicz, L., 1897-1898, “Ibn Chaldun, socjolog arabski xiv wieku”, Przegląd Filozoficzny, 4, p. 45-62.

Gumplowicz, L., 1905, Geschichte der Staatstheorien, Innsbruck, Wagner.

Gumplowicz, L., 1928a, Ausgewählte Werke, ed. by Salomon, G., in collaboration with Oppenheimer, F., Adler, M., Innsbruck, Wagner, 4 vol.

Gumplowicz, L., 1928b, “Ibn Chaldun, ein arabischer Soziolog des xiv. Jahrhunderts”, in Ausgewählte Werke, ed. by Salomon, G., Innsbruck, Wagner, vol. IV, p. 90-114.

Gumplowicz, L., 1928c “Sociologische Essays (1898)”, “Soziologie und Politik (1891)”, in Ausgewählte Werke, ed. by Salomon, G., Innsbruck, Wagner, vol. IV.

Gumplowicz, L., s. d., Aperçus sociologiques, Paris, A. Maloine.

Heckmann, F., Kröll, F., 1984, Einführung in die Geschichte der Soziologie, Stuttgart, Enke.

Henecka, H. P., 1990, Grundkurs Soziologie, 3rd ed. completed, Opladen, Leske & Budrich.

Hintze, O., 1929, “Soziologische und geschichtliche Staatsauffassung. Zu Franz Oppenheimers System der Soziologie”, Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft, 86 (1), p. 35-106.

Holsti, R., 1913, The Relation of War to the Origin of the State, Helsinki, Suomalaisen Tiedeakatemian Kustantama.

Ibn Khaldoun, [1377] 1951, Ausgewählte Abschnitte aus der Muqaddima, translated by Schimmel, A., Tübingen, Mohr (Paul Siebeck).

Ibn Khaldoun, [1377] 1992, Buch der Beispiele. Die Einführung al-Muqaddima, translated by Pätzold, M., Leipzig, Reclam.

Ibn Kaldoun, [1377] 2011, Die Muqaddima. Betrachtungen zur Weltgeschichte, ed. by Giese, A., Heinrichs, W., Munich, C. H. Beck.

Jeanpierre, L., 2014, « Transnationalisme pratique et transnationalisme théorique », symposium in honor of Michael Werner « Quelles sciences sociales pour quelle société ? Perspectives franco-allemandes—Eine Gesellschaft sucht ihre Sozialwissenschaften. Deutsch-französische Perspektiven », Paris, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 3-4 July 2014.

Jerusalem, W., 1926, Einführung in die Soziologie, Vienna/Leipzig, Wilhelm Braumüller.

Jonas, F., 1976, Geschichte der Soziologie, vol. 2, Von der Jahrhundertwende bis zur Gegenwart, Reinbek bei Hamburg, Rowohlt.

Käsler, D., 1984, Die frühe deutsche Soziologie 1909 bis 1934 und ihre Entstehungs-Milieus: Eine wissenschaftssoziologische Untersuchung, Opladen, Westdeutscher Verlag.

Keim, W., 2014, “Conceptualizing Circulation of Knowledge in the Social Sciences”, in Keim, W. et al. (eds.), Global Knowledge Production in the Social Sciences. Made in Circulation, Farnham/Burlington (Vermont), Ashgate, p. 87-113.

Keim, W., 2021, “Frenchman, Jew, Positivist. Reading the Rules and Mapping Émile Durkheim in Germany”, Études durkheimiennes/Durkheimian Studies, 25, p. 154-186.

Keim, W., forthcoming, “Locating the History of Sociology. Inequality, Exclusion, and Diversity ”, in McCallum, D. (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook on the History of Human Sciences, [s. l.], Palgrave Macmillan.

Kleinwäechter, F., 1909-1910, “Ludwig Gumplowicz”, Archiv für Rechts- und Wirtschaftsphilosophie, 3 (1), p. 78-80.

Kochanowski, I., 1909, “Ludwig Gumplowicz”, American Journal of Sociology, 15 (3), p. 405-409.

König, R., 1971, “Die Juden und die Soziologie [1961]”, in König, R. (ed.), Studien zur Soziologie. Thema mit Variationen, Frankfurt am Main, Fischer, p. 123-136.

Kremer, A. von, 1879, Ibn Chaldun und seine Culturgeschichte der islamischen Reiche, Vienna, Karl Gerold’s Sohn, Buchhändler der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, URL: https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_g34pAAAAYAAJ/page/n49/mode/2up (accessed 03/09/2022).

Lepape, P., 2003, “‘Le livre des exemples’ d’Ibn Khaldûn. L’inventeur de la sociologie”, Le Monde diplomatique, January 2003, p. 31.

Lepsius, R., 1981, “Die Soziologie der Zwischenkriegszeit. Entwicklungstendenzen und Beurteilungskriterien”, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, special issue, 23, p. 7-23.

Lieber, H.-J., 1959, “Jerusalem, Wilhelm”, in Bernsdorf, W., Knospe, H., (eds.), Internationales Soziologenlexikon, Stuttgart, Ferdinand Enke, p. 247-248.

Martinez-Gros, G., 2005, “Que faire d’Ibn Khaldûn?”, Esprit, 319 (11), p. 148-166.

Messaoudi, A., 2008, “Slane, William Mac Gukin de”, in Pouillon, F. (ed.), Dictionnaire des orientalistes de langue française, Paris, IISMM/Karthala, p. 902 ff.

Meyer, E., [1884] 1925, Geschichte des Altertums, vol. 1-1, Einleitung. Elemente der Anthropologie, 5th ed., Stuttgart/Berlin, Cotta’sche Buchhandlung.

Mierendorff, M., 1959, “Proesler, Hans”, in Bernsdorf, W., Knospe, H. (eds.), Internationales Soziologenlexikon, Stuttgart, Ferdinand Enke, p. 446-447.

Miller, A., 1959, “Oppenheimer, Franz”, in Bernsdorf, W., Knospe, H. (eds.), Internationales Soziologenlexikon, Stuttgart, Ferdinand Enke, p. 421-424.

Oppenheimer, F.,1912, Der Staat, Frankfurt am Main, Rütten & Loening.

Oppenheimer, F., 1926, System der Soziologie, vol. 2, Der Staat, Jena, Gustav Fischer.

Oppenheimer, F., [1926] 1996, “Der Staat in nationalökonomischer Hinsicht”, in Schoeps, J. H., Silbermann, A., Süssmuth, H. (eds.), Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, Politische Schriften, Berlin, Akademie Verlag, p. 485-516.

Oppenheimer, F., 1933, System der Soziologie, vol. 4, Abriss einer Sozial und Wirtschaftsgeschichte von der Völkerwanderung bis zur Gegenwart, Jena, Gustav Fischer, section 2, « Adel und Bauernschaft. Das Mittelalter ».

Proesler, H., 1935, Die Anfaenge der Gesellschaftslehre. Erlangen, Palm & Enke.

Salomon, G. (ed.), 1928, Ausgewählte Werke, Innsbruck, Wagner.

Salomon-Delatour, G., 1965, Moderne Staatslehren, Neuwied, Luchterhand.

Savorgnan, F., 1928, “Vorwort”, in Gumplowicz, L., Ausgewählte Werke, ed. by Salomon, G., Innsbruck, Wagner, p. ix-xxv.

Scherrer, H., 1914, Grundsätze und Gesetze der Soziologie, Leipzig, O. Hillmann.

Schütz, M., 1994, Rassenideologien in der Sozialwissenschaft: Über vier rassentheoretische Entwürfe zur Erklärung von Geschichte und Gesellschaft am fin de siècle (1880-1910), inaugural thesis for the title of doctor, Freiburg im Breisgau, Philosophischen Fakultäten der Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Bern, Peter Lang.

Simmel, G., [1908] 1992, Soziologie: Untersuchung über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp.

Slane, W. M. G. de, 1857, “Introduction”, in Slane, W. M. G. de (ed.), Notices et extraits des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque impériale, t. XIX, Prolegomènes historiques d’Ibn Chaldun, Paris, Imprimerie impériale, 1st part, p. i-cxvi.

Soyer, M., Gilbert, P., 2012, “Debating the Origins of Sociology. Ibn Khaldun as a Founding Father of Sociology”, International Journal of Sociological Research, 5 (1-2), p. 13-30.

Squillace, F., [1902] 1911, Die soziologischen Theorien von Dr. Fausto Squillace, Prof. an der Université Nouvelle in Brüssel, Leipzig, Werner Klinkhardt.

Tönnies, F., [1887] 1935, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundbegriffe der reinen Soziologie, 8th revised and expanded ed., Leipzig, Hans Buske.

Torrance, J., 1976, “The Emergence of Sociology in Austria, 1885-1935”, European Journal of Sociology, 17 (2), p. 185-219.

Van den Bergh, S., 1912, Umriss der muhammedanischen Wissenschaften nach Ibn Haldun, inaugural thesis for the title of doctor, Leiden, Brill.

Ward, L. F., [1903] 1970, Pure Sociology. A Treatise on the Origin and Spontaneous Development of Society, 2^nd ed., New York, Augustus M. Kelley.

Weber, M., [1910-1920, posthum] 1947, Grundriss der Sozialökonomik, vol. III, Abteilung: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 3rd ed., Tübingen, Mohr (Paul Siebeck).

Willms, C., 2018, Franz Oppenheimer (1864-1943). Liberaler Sozialist, Zionist, Utopist. Reihe jüdische Moderne: Band 19, Wien, Böhlau Verlag.

Worms, R. (ed.), 1913, Annales de l’Institut international de sociologie, Paris, International Institute of Sociology.

Zebrowski, B., 1926, Ludwig Gumplowicz. Eine Bio-Bibliographie, Berlin, R. L. Prager.

Notes

For a conceptualisation of “reception” as a particular form of knowledge circulation, see Keim, 2014 ↩
Martinez-Gros, 2005, 164. All translations of works other than in English are the author’s.↩
Lepape, 2003.↩
Ward, [1903] 1970, 508.↩
Soyer, Gilbert, 2012, 27.↩
Ben Saad, 2008.↩
Salomon-Delatour, 1965, 115.↩
Alatas, 2014, 100; Ward, [1903] 1970, 56.↩
Ayad, 1930a, 18-19.↩
Abdesselem, 1983; Alatas, 2014.↩
Abdesselem, 1983, 55-56; Alatas, 2014.↩
Abdesselem, 1983, 103-104.↩
Alatas, 2014, 114-115.↩
See also his own initiative to create a contemporary Khaldunian sociology: Alatas, 2014.↩
For an overview on all variants of the text known to the first translator of his complete works into French, the baron de Slane, see Slane, 1857. For an overview on editions and translations of Ibn Khaldun in European and non-European languages, see Abdesselem, 1983, 9-16; as well as chapter 6 in Alatas, 2014, 135-156. ↩
Alatas, 2014, 100.↩
It seems that some of the texts on which European editions and translations could build were even prey to colonial encounters, the details of which would call for a more material history of Ibn Khaldun’s reception in Europe. See e.g., what Slane says about volume VI of Ibn Khaldun’s Universal History: “Le tome VI, celle des Seldjoukides et des Tartars. Cet exemplaire fut transporté de la bibliothèque d’Alger à celle de Paris, en l’an 1841, par l’ordre du ministre de la guerre. Il avait appartenu au célèbre Salah Bey, [écriture arabe], qui le donna l’an 1205 [? illisible] de l’hégire (1798 de J. C.) à la mosquée fondée par lui à Constantine. Lors de la prise de cette ville par les Français, tous les livres appartenant à la mosquée avaient été employés par les Turcs pour faire des barricades. M. Berbruger, qui se trouvait alors avec l’armée, put sauver environ un millier de volumes, qu’il fit transporter à la bibliothèque d’Alger. Le reste fut perdu, ayant été dispersé, ou brûlé à défaut de bois de chauffage.” (Slane, 1857, cv) ↩
Abdesselem, 1983, 43.↩
Lepape, 2003.↩
Aillet, 2016, 251.↩
Abdesselem, 1983, 47-49.↩
Dozy, 1869; Slane, 1857.↩
Martinez-Gros, 2005, 150.↩
Messaoudi, 2008, 902.↩
Slane, 1857, ↩cxiv.
Abdesselem, 1983, 47-49.↩
Exenberger, 2001, 100.↩
Kremer, 1879.↩
↩Ibid., 55.
Meyer, [1884] 1925, 82-84.↩
Gülich, 1992.↩
Käsler, 1984.↩
Appendix 10 to Käsler, 1984.↩
Frank, 1884; Van den Bergh, 1912.↩
Ayad, 1930a, 1930b.↩
The German National Library’s catalogue, alongside his officially registered person name “Ibn-Ḫaldūn, ʿAbd-ar-Raḥmān Ibn-Muḥammad”, lists seventy-six other variants (Deutsche national Bibliothek, URL : http://d-nb.info/gnd/118639773, accessed 31/08/2022). ↩
Within the field of Oriental studies, see Wesendonck, O. G. von, 1929, “Ibn Chaldun ein arabischer Kulturhistoriker des 14. Jahrhunderts”, Deutsche Rundschau, 194, p. 46 f.; as well as Fleischmann, P., 1932, “Chaldun, Ibn Zum Gedächtnis”, Der Orient, 14, p. 56. By a philosopher: Dempf, A., 1922-1923, “Ibn Chaldun und Oswald Spengler, die ewige Wiederkehr”, Hochland, 20 (1), p. 113-130.↩
Three could not be checked because they were not available in any of the consulted libraries and distance-loan was interrupted during the phase of data collection due to the pandemic. One book gave the strong impression of a case of silent reception of Ibn Khaldun: Grundsätze und Gesetze der Soziologie by Hans Scherrer (1914) referred to both Kremer and to Gumplowicz and discussed themes related to the cyclical model of the rise and fall of states, the scholarly debate in the context of which Ibn Khaldun was mainly acknowledged, as we shall see. ↩
Alatas, 2014, 115.↩
Bernsdorf, 1980, 111.↩
Eisler, 1903, 20.↩
Jerusalem, 1926, 36-37.↩
Mierendorff, 1959, 446-447.↩
Proesler, 1935, 6 ff. On the dating and locating of sociology’s history, also see Keim, forthcoming. ↩
Proesler, 1935, 21.↩
Grünfeld, [1908] 1910, 111 ff.↩
Id., 1908.↩
Id., [1908] 1910.↩
↩Ibid., 113-114.
Squillace, [1902] 1911, translation by R. Eisler.↩
↩Ibid., 10.
Proesler, 1935, 60.↩
Alatas, 2014, 115.↩
Miller, 1959, 422.↩
Oppenheimer, 1926, 250, emphasis in original.↩
↩Ibid., 173.
↩Ibid., 251.
Oppenheimer, 1933, 173.↩
Id., 1912.↩
Brix, 1986b, 20; Goetze, 1969, 140; Schütz, 1994, 68-69; Zebrowski, 1926, 5.↩
Gumplowicz, [1883] 1909.↩
Brix, 1986d, 11; Kleinwäechter, 1909/1910, 79; Schütz, 1994, 56; Zebrowski, 1926, 5.↩
Brix, 1986c, 32-33; Torrance, 1976.↩
Gumplowicz, [1885] 1905.↩
Id., [1885] 1909, 374-375.↩
Gumplowicz’s “race” concept actually did not correspond to an anthropological/classificatory concept of race. It came close to a political, as opposed to an economic, concept of class; for a thorough discussion of this, see Schütz, 1994.↩
Hintze, 1929, 35.↩
“Gumplowicz not only stated that is theory ‘grew up on Polish soil’ [footnote: System Socjologii, Warsaw, 1887, p. 1], but also quoted two Polish historians who had previously used a hypothesis of conquest. They were K. Szajnocha and F. Piekosinski, who coined and applied a ‘Conquest Hypothesis’ to the origin of the Polish state [footnote: K. Szajnocha, Lechicki poczatek Polski (Lechian Origin of Poland), Lvov, 1858 and F. Piekosinski, ‘O powstaniu spoleczenstwa w wiekach srednich’ (‘About the Formation of Polish Society in Middle Ages’), in Polska Akademia Umiejetnosci, Cracow, 1881 and ‘W obronie hipotezy najazdu’ (‘A Defense of the Hypothesis of Conquest’), 1883]. Gumplowicz knew their works and presented them in his Allgemeines Staatsrecht [footnote: Innsbruck, 1897, p. 69].” (Gella, 1971, xvii)↩
Gumplowicz, [1875] 1909, 380.↩
Id., [1892] 1902, 78.↩
Id., 1897-1898.↩
Id., [1898] 1928b.↩
Id., s. a.↩
Id., [1898] 1928b, 91-92.↩
↩Ibid., 95.
↩Ibid.
↩Ibid., 106 ff.
↩Ibid., 102.
Gumplowicz, 1905, 124, emphasis in the original.↩
↩Ibid., 126.
Goetze, 1969, 11.↩
Gumplowicz, 1928b, 101.↩
Oppenheimer, 1926, 173.↩
Kremer, 1879, 46-47.↩
Gumplowicz, 1928b, 104-105.↩
Brix, 1986c, 34.↩
Kochanowski, 1909, 405.↩
Kleinwäechter, 1909-1910, 80.↩
Goetze, 1969, 76 ff.↩
Gumplowicz, 1928a.↩
↩e.g., Holsti, 1913.
Lester F. Ward, with whom Gumplowicz entertained a lively correspondence, had adopted his views on the state nearly identically (see Goetze 1969, 63 ff.). See also Howard Becker and Leon Smelo’s article “Conflict Theories of the Origin of the State” (Becker, Smelo, 1931), that draws the direct connection between Ibn Khaldun, Gumplowicz and Oppenheimer.↩
Feuerhahn, 2014.↩
Keim, forthcoming.↩
Käsler, 1984, 357-385.↩
König, 1971.↩
Torrance, 1976.↩
↩Ibid., 195
Jeanpierre, 2014.↩
Brix, 1986a, 10-15, 45-57; Schütz, 1994, 270 ff.↩

The Contemporary Significance of Ibn Khaldun for Decolonial Sociology: Methodological and Theoretical Dimensions

Notes

Show the following:

Adjust appearance:

Journal of the History of the Human Sciences (Dec. 2022) Vol. 41.

https://doi.org/10.4000/rhsh.7467

Ibn Khaldun in Early German-language Sociological Theory: A Historical Case of South-North Reception

Wiebke Keim

Ibn Khaldun: The Author, His Oeuvre, and the Historical Context of Its Reception

The reception of Ibn Khaldun in early German-language sociology: analysis of a cross-section of representative literature

Biographic elements

Ibn Khaldun and the sociological theory of the state

Conclusion: a lost legacy

Appendix

Bibliography

Notes

Annotate