Among the Muslim scholars `Abd al-Rahman ibn Khaldun of...

Among the Muslim scholars `Abd al-Rahman ibn Khaldun of Tunisia was the first and the foremost Islamic thinker to discuss clearly and explicitly the laws governing the society in independence from the laws governing the individual. Consequently, he asserted that society itself had a special character, individuality, and reality. In his famous introduction to the history, he has discussed this theory in detail.

Among the modern scholars and thinkers, Montesquieu (the French philosopher of the eighteenth century A.D.) is the first to discuss the laws which control and govern human groups and societies. Raymond Aaron says about Montesquieu: His purpose was to make history intelligible. He sought to understand histori­cal truth. But historical truth appeared to him in the form of an almost limit­less diversity of morals, customs, ideas, laws, and institutions.

His inquiry’s point of departure was precisely this seemingly incoherent diversity. The goal of the inquiry should have been the replacement of this incoherent diversity with a conceptual order. One might say that Montesquieu, exactly like Max Weber, wanted to proceed from meaningless fact to an intelligible order. This attitude is precisely the one peculiar to the sociologist.

(1) It means that a sociologist has to reach beyond the apparently diverse social forms and phenomena, which seem to be alien to one another, to reveal the unity in diversity in order to prove that all the diverse manifestations refer to the one and the same reality. In the same way, all similar social events and phenomena have their origin in a similar sequence of analogous causes.

Here is a passage from the observations on the causes of the rise and fall of the Romans: It is not fortune that rules the world. We can ask the Romans, who had a constant series of successes when they followed a certain plan, and an uninterrupted sequence of disasters when they followed another. There are general causes, whether moral or physical, which operate in every monarchy, to bring about its rise, its duration and its fall.

All accidents are subject to these causes, and if the outcome of a single battle, i.e. a particular cause, was the ruin of a state, there was a general cause which decreed that that state was destined to perish through a single battle. In short, the main impulse carries all the particular accidents along with it.