Name : Heidi Amr Gohar

ID : 87937

Professor : Dr.Mervat El-Tarabeeshi

 IBN KHALDUN

Introduction

Abū Zayd ‘Abd ar-Raḥmān ibn Muḥammad ibn Khaldūn al-Ḥaḍramī; 27 May 1332 – 17 March
1406) was an Arab scholar of Islam,[10] social scientist and historian[11] who has been described
as the father of the modern disciplines of historiography, sociology, economics, and demography.

And i will discuss in the reasearch his interpretatiin related to the society , individual and the state
as well .

Ibn Khaldun philoophy and interpretation related to the individual , society and the state

Ibn Khaldun’s epistemology attempted to reconcile mysticism with theology by dividing science
into two different categories, the religious science that regards the sciences of the Qur’an and the
non-religious science. He further classified the non-religious sciences into intellectual sciences
such as logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, etc. And auxiliary sciences such as language,
literature, poetry, etc. He also suggested that possibly more divisions will appear in the future
with different societies. He tried to adapt to all possible societies’ cultural behavior and influence
in education, economics and politics. Nonetheless, he didn’t think that laws were chosen by just
one leader or a small group of individual but mostly by the majority of the individuals of a society.
[44]

To Ibn Khaldun, the state was a necessity of human society to restrain injustice within the society,
but the state means is force, thus itself an injustice. All societies must have a state governing them
in order to establish a society. He attempted to standardize the history of societies by identifying
ubiquitous phenomena present in all societies. To him, civilization was a phenomenon that will be
present as long as humans exist. He characterized the fulfillment of basic needs as the beginning
of civilization. At the beginning, people will look for different ways of increasing productivity of
basic needs and expansion will occur. Later the society starts becoming more sedentary and
focuses more on crafting, arts and the more refined characteristics. By the end of a society, it will
weaken, allowing another small group of individuals to come into control. The conquering group is
described as an unsatisfied group within the society itself or a group of desert bandits that
constantly attack other weaker or weakened societies.

In the Muqaddimah, his most important work, he thoughtfully and scrupulously discusses an
introduction of philosophy to history in a general manner, based on observable patterns within a
theoretical framework of known historical events of his time. He described the beginnings,
development, cultural trends and the fall of all societies, leading to the rise of a new society which
would then follow the same trends in a continuous cycle. Ibn Khaldun did not create a perfect
model for a society during his life, but he did think there was a need for a new model to manage
society to ensure its continuous economic growth. Also, he recommended the best political
approaches to develop a society according to his knowledge of history. He heavily emphasized
that a good society would be one in which a tradition of education is deeply rooted in its culture.
[25] Ibn Khaldun (1987) introduced word asabiya (solidarity, group feeling, or group
consciousness), to explain tribalism. The concept of asabiya has been translated as “social
cohesion,” “group solidarity,” or “tribalism.” This social cohesion arises spontaneously in tribes
and other small kinship groups (Rashed,2017).

Ibn Khaldun believed that too much bureaucracy, such as taxes and legislations, would lead to the
decline of a society, since it would constrain the development of more specialized labor (increase
in scholars and development of different services). He believed that bureaucrats cannot
understand the world of commerce and do not possess the same motivation as a businessman.
[25]

In his work the Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun emphasizes human beings’ faculty to think (fikr) as
what determines human behavior and ubiquitous patterns. This faculty is also what inspires
human beings to form into a social structure to co-operate in division of labor and organization.
According to Zaid Ahmand in Epistemology and the Human Dimension in Urban Studies, the fikr
faculty is the supporting pillar for all philosophical aspects of Ibn Khaldun’s theory related to
human beings’ spiritual, intellectual, physical, social and political tendencies.

Another important concept he emphasizes in his work is the mastery of crafts, habits and skills.
These takes place after a society is established and according to Ibn Khaldun the level of
achievement of a society can be determined by just analyzing these three concepts. A society in its
earliest stages is nomadic and primarily concerned with survival, while a society at a later stage is
sedentary, with greater achievement in crafts. A society with a sedentary culture and stable
politics would be expected to have greater achievements in crafts and technology.[25]

Ibn Khaldun also emphasized in his epistemology theory the important aspect that educational
tradition plays to ensure the new generations of a civilization continuously improve in the sciences
and develop culture. Ibn Khaldun argued that without the strong establishment of an educational
tradition, it would be very difficult for the new generations to maintain the achievements of the
earlier generations, let alone improve them.
Advancements in literary works such as poems and prose were another way to distinguish the
achievement of a civilization, but Ibn Khaldun believed that whenever the literary facet of a
society reaches its highest levels it ceases to indicate societal achievements anymore, but is an
embellishment of life. For logical sciences he established knowledge at its highest level as an
increase of scholars and the quality of knowledge. For him the highest level of literary productions
would be the manifestation of prose, poems and the artistic enrichment of a society.

Conclusion :

More than six centuries after Ibn Khaldun’s death the modern world has much to learn from
studying him , This grand scheme to find a new science of society makes him the forerunner of many
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries system-builders such as Vico, Comte and Marx." "As one
of the early founders of the social sciences .

Jean Jacques Rousseau

Introduction :

Jean-Jacques Rousseau remains an important figure in the history of philosophy, both

because of his contributions to political philosophy and moral psychology and because
of his influence on later thinkers.
And in this research i will explain his interpretation related to the state , individual and
society .

Jean Jacques Rousseau

Rousseau’s contributions to political philosophy are scattered among various works, most
notable of which are the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, the Discourse on Political
Economy, The Social Contract, and Considerations on the Government of Poland. However,
many of his other works, both major and minor, contain passages that amplify or illuminate
the political ideas in those works. His central doctrine in politics is that a state can be
legitimate only if it is guided by the “general will” of its members. This idea finds its most
detailed treatment in The Social Contract.
In The Social Contract, Rousseau sets out to answer what he takes to be the fundamental
question of politics, the reconciliation of the freedom of the individual with the authority of
the state. This reconciliation is necessary because human society has evolved to a point where
individuals can no longer supply their needs through their own unaided efforts, but rather
must depend on the co-operation of others. The process whereby human needs expand and
interdependence deepens is set out in the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality. In that
work, the final moment of Rousseau’s conjectural history involves the emergence of endemic
conflict among the now-interdependent individuals and the argument that the Hobbesian
insecurity of this condition would lead all to consent to the establishment of state authority
and law. In the Second Discourse, this establishment amounts to the reinforcement of unequal
and exploitative social relations that are now backed by law and state power. In an echo of
Locke and an anticipation of Marx, Rousseau argues that this state would, in effect, be a class
state, guided by the common interest of the rich and propertied and imposing unfreedom and
subordination on the poor and weak. The propertyless consent to such an establishment
because their immediate fear of a Hobbesian state of war leads them to fail to attend to the
ways in which the new state will systematically disadvantage them.
The Social Contract aims to set out an alternative to this dystopia, an alternative in which,
Rousseau claims, each person will enjoy the protection of the common force whilst remaining
as free as they were in the state of nature. The key to this reconciliation is the idea of the
general will: that is, the collective will of the citizen body taken as a whole. The general will
is the source of law and is willed by each and every citizen. In obeying the law each citizen is
thus subject to his or her own will, and consequently, according to Rousseau, remains free.
The idea of the general will
Rousseau’s account of the general will is marked by unclarities and ambiguities that have
attracted the interest of commentators since its first publication. The principal tension is
between a democratic conception, where the general will is simply what the citizens of the
state have decided together in their sovereign assembly, and an alternative interpretation
where the general will is the transcendent incarnation of the citizens’ common interest that
exists in abstraction from what any of them actually wants (Bertram 2012). Both views find
some support in Rousseau’s texts, and both have been influential. Contemporary epistemic
conceptions of democracy often make reference to Rousseau’s discussion in Book 2 chapter 3
of of The Social Contract. These accounts typically take Condorcet’s jury theorem as a
starting point, where democratic procedures are conceived of as a method for discovering the
truth about the public interest; they then interpret the general will as a deliberative means of
seeking outcomes that satisfy the preferences of individuals and render the authority of the
state legitimate (see for example, Grofman and Feld 1988). The tension between the
“democratic” and the “transcendental” conceptions can be reduced if we take Rousseau to be
arguing for the view that, under the right conditions and subject to the right procedures,
citizen legislators will be led to converge on laws that correspond to their common interest;
however, where those conditions and procedures are absent, the state necessarily lacks
legitimacy. On such a reading, Rousseau may be committed to something like an a posteriori
philosophical anarchism. Such a view holds that it is be possible, in principle, for a state to
exercise legitimate authority over its citizens, but all actual states—and indeed all states that
we are likely to see in the modern era—will fail to meet the conditions for legitimacy.
Rousseau argues that in order for the general will to be truly general it must come from all
and apply to all. This thought has both substantive and formal aspects. Formally, Rousseau
argues that the law must be general in application and universal in scope. The law cannot
name particular individuals and it must apply to everyone within the state. Rousseau believes
that this condition will lead citizens, though guided by a consideration of what is in their own
private interest, to favor laws that both secure the common interest impartially and that are
not burdensome and intrusive. For this to be true, however, it has to be the case that the
situation of citizens is substantially similar to one another. In a state where citizens enjoy a
wide diversity of lifestyles and occupations, or where there is a great deal of cultural
diversity, or where there is a high degree of economic inequality, it will not generally be the
case that the impact of the laws will be the same for everyone. In such cases it will often not
be true that a citizen can occupy the standpoint of the general will merely by imagining the
impact of general and universal laws on his or her own case.

Conclusion :

Rousseau’s thinking has had a profound influence on later philosophers and political theorists,
although the tensions and ambiguities in his work have meant that his ideas have been developed
in radically incompatible and divergent ways. In modern political philosophy, for example, it is
possible to detect Rousseau as a source of inspiration for liberal theories, communitarian ideas,
civic republicanism, and in theories of deliberative and participatory democracy. Hostile writers
have portrayed Rousseau as a source of inspiration for the more authoritarian aspects of the
French revolution and thence for aspects of fascism and communism.
 Karl Marx

Karl Marx’s ideas about the state can be divided into three subject areas: pre-capitalist states,
states in the capitalist (i.e. present) era and the state (or absence of one) in post-capitalist society.
Overlaying this is the fact that his own ideas about the state changed as he grew older, differing in
his early pre-communist phase, the young Marx phase which predates the unsuccessful 1848
uprisings in Europe and in his later work

I will explain in this reseaech his interpretations related to the state , society and individual .

Karl Marx

Karl Marx based his conflict theory on the idea that modern society has only two
classes of people: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The Bourgeoisie are the
owners of the means of production: the factories, businesses, and equipment
needed to produce wealth. The Proletariat are the workers.
According to Marx, the bourgeoisie in capitalist societies exploit workers. The owners
pay them enough to afford food and a place to live, and the workers, who do not
realize they are being exploited, have a false consciousness, or a mistaken sense,
that they are well off. They think they can count on their capitalist bosses to do what
was best for them.

Marx foresaw a workers’ revolution. As the rich grew richer, Marx hypothesized that
workers would develop a true class consciousness, or a sense of shared identity
based on their common experience of exploitation by the bourgeoisie. The workers
would unite and rise up in a global revolution. Once the dust settled after the
revolution, the workers would then own the means of production, and the world
would become communist. No one stratum would control the access to wealth.
Everything would be owned equally by everyone.
Marx’s vision did not come true. As societies modernized and grew larger, the
working classes became more educated, acquiring specific job skills and achieving
the kind of financial well-being that Marx never thought possible. Instead of
increased exploitation, they came under the protection of unions and labor laws.
Skilled factory workers and tradespeople eventually began to earn salaries that were
similar to, or in some instances greater than, their middle-class counterparts.

Bourgeois state ...

In Marx's 1843 Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, his basic conception is that the state
and civil society are separate. However, he already saw some limitations to that model,
arguing:
The political state everywhere needs the guarantee of spheres lying outside it.[1]
He as yet was saying nothing about the abolition of private property, does not express
a developed theory of class, and "the solution [he offers] to the problem of the
state/civil society separation is a purely political solution, namely universal suffrage."
(Evans, 112)
By the time he wrote The German Ideology (1846), Marx viewed the state as a creature of
the bourgeois economic interest. Two years later, that idea was expounded in The Communist
Manifesto:[2]
The executive of the modern state is nothing but a committee for managing the
common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.[3]
This represents the high point of conformance of the state theory to an economic
interpretation of history in which the forces of production determine peoples' production
relations and their production relations determine all other relations, including the political. [4]
[5][6] Although "determines" is the strong form of the claim, Marx also uses "conditions".
Even "determination" is not causality and some reciprocity of action is admitted. The
bourgeoisie control the economy, therefore they control the state. In this theory, the state is an
instrument of class rule.

Proletariat

The proletariat (/ˌproʊlɪˈtɛəriət/ from Latin proletarius “producing offspring”) is the social class of
wage-earners in an economic society whose only possession of significant material value is their
labour power (how much work they can do) A member of such a class is a proletarian.

Marxist philosophy considers the proletariat to be oppressed by capitalism and the wage system.
This oppression gives the proletariat common economic and political interests that transcend
national boundaries. These common interests put the proletariat in a position to unite and take
power away from the capitalist class in order to create a communist society free from class
distinctions

The Relation of State and Law to Property

In the case of the nations which grew out of the Middle Ages, tribal property evolved through
various stages — feudal landed property, corporative moveable property, capital invested in
manufacture — to modern capital, determined by big industry and universal competition, i.e. pure
private property, which has cast off all semblance of a communal institution and has shut out the
State from any influence on the development of property. To this modern private property
corresponds the modern State, which, purchased gradually by the owners of property by means of
taxation, has fallen entirely into their hands through the national debt, and its existence has
become wholly dependent on the commercial credit which the owners of property, the bourgeois,
extend to it, as reflected in the rise and fall of State funds on the stock exchange. By the mere fact
that it is a class and no longer an estate, the bourgeoisie is forced to organise itself no longer
locally, but nationally, and to give a general form to its mean average interest. Through the
emancipation of private property from the community, the State has become a separate entity,
beside and outside civil society; but it is nothing more than the form of organisation which the
bourgeois necessarily adopt both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of
their property and interests. The independence of the State is only found nowadays in those
countries where the estates have not yet completely developed into classes, where the estates,
done away with in more advanced countries, still have a part to play, and where there exists a
mixture; countries, that is to say, in which no one section of the population can achieve
dominance over the others. This is the case particularly in Germany. The most perfect example of
the modern State is North America. The modern French, English and American writers all express
the opinion that the State exists only for the sake of private property, so that this fact has
penetrated into the consciousness of the normal man.

Conclusion :

Karl Marx,with his theory of socialism advocated for a society in which there is public ownership of
means of production, distribution as well as exchange. He was an against capitalism in which the
ownership of means of production is on individual basis.