Ibn Khaldun’s Fourteenth Century Views on Bureaucracy

Abstract

Introduction
Adam Smith observed in his Wealth of Nations in 1776 that kings-or in
my terminology the early bureaucratic leaders - existed already in “that rude
state of society which precedes the extension of commerce and the improvement
of manufactures” (Smith 1976: 907). Max Weber considered bureaucracy
a necessary precondition for the development of society (Mieczkowski 1984:
105-06; Zinam 1984: 77-78) providing the element of functional organization
and purpose. However, since power corrupts, it comes as no surprise that
even the early bureaucratic leaders developed some dysfunctional traits, that
corruption all too frequently became the prevalent mode of operation, and
that the benign functional bureaucratic organizations, or ”borgs,” became in
many cases transformed into “dysborgs,” or the dysfunctional bureaucratic
organizations. An analysis of dysborgs and of some of their implications is
offered in Mieczkowski and Zinam, Bureaucracy, Ideology, Technology: Quality
of Life East and West (1984), and the terminology that is used in the present
essay to interpret historical views, with their original concepts, will be
from the Mieczkowski and Zinam book.
Because the rudimentary bureaucratic organization developed early, some
astute observers found already in remote times that bureaucracy is not always
benign. It was, therefore, with great interest that I discovered one such observer
who had been neglected by Western historians of economic thought, except
for a footnote and a bare small-print mention in Joseph Schumpeter‘s History
of Economic Analysis (1954: 136, 788), a footnote in Colin Clark’s Conditions
of Economic Progress (1957: 6), and a footnote in Barry Gordon’s
Economic Analysis Before Adam Smith (1957: 121). The writer in question
was an Arab historian and philosopher, Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), who covered
many topics of interest to economists, and who in some respects was head
of the founder of the science of economics, Adam Smith. Such occasional ...