Decadence? The Khaldunian cycle in Algeria and South Africa

This article asks if Ibn Khaldun's cycle - his study of how civilisations rise and fall - is relevant to the modern world. Two introductory sections set the stage for the reply: a series of early nineteenth century American paintings is used to explicate the theory, which is then put in historical context. The theory is applied to two countries - Algeria and South Africa - where the sense of national solidarity changed radically at the end of the twentieth century. The decay of Algeria's nationalist and socialist identity and the rise of South African nonracial citizenship show how flexible and subject to rational calculation asabiyah can be in the modern world. Group feeling can be redefined most successfully in situations of prosperity, as well as when state institutions have the capacity to check and balance executive power. But as recent United States history indicates, we remain vulnerable to the misuse of those institutions: the paper concludes by suggesting that even countries once proudly confident that they had broken the Khaldunian cycle may, in fact, be facing decay.