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Ibn Khaldun's 1377 work Muqaddimah is a very old book that essentially says this.

The concept of "ʿasabiyyah" (Arabic: "tribalism, clanism, communitarism", or in a modern context, "group feeling" , "social cohesion", "solidarity" or even "nationalism") is one of the best known aspects of the Muqaddimah. As this ʿasabiyyah declines, another more compelling ʿasabiyyah may take its place; thus, civilizations rise and fall, and history describes these cycles of ʿasabiyyah as they play out.

Ibn Khaldun argues that each dynasty has within itself the seeds of its own downfall. He explains that ruling houses tend to emerge on the peripheries of great empires and use the unity presented by those areas to their advantage in order to bring about a change in leadership. As the new rulers establish themselves at the center of their empire, they become increasingly lax and more concerned with maintaining their lifestyles. Thus, a new dynasty can emerge at the periphery of their control and effect a change in leadership, beginning the cycle anew.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muqaddimah

From studying history a bit, I do agree that it's striking how often new powerful civilizations are formed from groups of people that existed on the periphery and had very little institutional power a generation or two beforehand. The Mongols, the Ottomans, and Napoleonic France are just a few examples.




> Ibn Khaldun argues that each dynasty has within itself the seeds of its own downfall.

More recently, Hegel made the same point.


I’m curious about a reference for this.


I am not an expert in Hegel or Ibn Khaldun, but I'm not sure that they're making the same point. I don't think Ibn Khaldun means that this process leads to progress; it's just a description of changes over time. The new civilization isn't necessarily superior or somehow more developed than the previous one.

Hegel, on the other hand, is very much wrapped up in the "progress" concept:

Hegel’s dialectical method leads to concepts or forms that are increasingly comprehensive and universal. As Hegel puts it, the result of the dialectical process, "is a new concept but one higher and richer than the preceding—richer because it negates or opposes the preceding and therefore contains it, and it contains even more than that, for it is the unity of itself and its opposite."

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-dialectics/

Here's a (PDF) paper comparing the two thinkers: https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/view/2196




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