Sociology’s Forgotten Origins: Khaldun, Ferguson, and Spencer

We’re constantly trying to understand human behavior: why we live the way we do, and why we make the choices we make. But many of those choices aren’t just driven by personal preference. They’re shaped by something larger than us. Sociology explores how social structures, institutions, traditions, and unwritten rules shape human behavior—and how, in turn, our behavior reshapes society itself. It’s the study of human societies, and how they adapt and transform over time.

But in today’s political landscape, sociology tends to function less as a neutral diagnostic tool and more as a battlefield of competing visions of hierarchy, inequality, and social control, fighting to define injustices and determine which authority is justified in intervening.

As a result, libertarians often view the discipline with suspicion, believing that it frequently shifts from describing social patterns to prescribing centralized solutions. Sociologists often treat spontaneous orders, voluntary associations, and market processes not as legitimate forms of coordination, but as pathologies in need of expert management.

Sociology is a discipline concerned with describing and explaining how large numbers of people coordinate their lives and how power structures reproduce themselves over time. To understand why patterns exist. Libertarian skepticism toward modern sociology is often not hostility toward the study societes, but rather toward factional adherents of leftist ideologies within academia.

Contemporary libertarians and sociologists often collide over whether the individual or the collective is the primary unit of moral and analytical concern. Libertarianism begins with the sovereignty of the individual, while much of modern sociology treats the individual as largely defined by social forces. The debate between the two sides centers on who actually shapes history: people or institutions.​

Similarly, there is a multi-​generational debate between sociologists and economists over whose discipline is more fraudulent. Economics traditionally prioritizes models, incentives, and choice under constraints, while sociology emphasizes norms, power, culture, and structure. Each side often sees the other as either overly abstract or insufficiently rigorous.

For most libertarians, economics forms the core explanatory language of politics: incentives matter, knowledge is dispersed, and unintended consequences dominate social life. That framework makes sociology, especially in its modern, often ideological forms, look suspicious, because it often seems to downplay individual choice and price-​like signals in favor of appeals to systems. The result is not that libertarianism rejects the study of society, but that it distrusts a version of sociology that drifts toward moralized storytelling rather than causal explanation. When sociology treats individuals primarily as products of structures, libertarians hear an argument for state intervention.

There are numerous studies that illustrate sociologists’ political opinions. For example, Daniel Klein and Charlotta Stern conclude that members of the American Sociological Association are overwhelmingly left-​leaning. But does this mean sociology is of no use to libertarians? I do not think so.

The beginnings of sociology are unique in that sociology did not have one singular starting point or genesis, but experienced many beginnings or a polygenesis, a discipline born from many intellectual lineages, including political economy, moral philosophy, history, and anthropology, rather than one defined by a single founding moment.

This polygenetic origin explains why sociology has always contained two competing impulses. One impulse treats society as an emergent order to be understood, and the other treats society as raw material to be shaped. These impulses coexist uneasily within the same discipline. The thinkers explored here belong to the first tradition of studying society as an emergent order.

By examining these many beginnings of sociology, an alternate history of sociology emerges, along with a more favorable image for libertarians. Sociology is not exclusively a science of social engineering, but a tradition that takes spontaneous order, limits on power, and the fragility of freedom seriously. Seen this way, sociology becomes less an enemy of liberty and more a forgotten ally in understanding a free society.

Three thinkers we will review today represent how sociology can be applied while respecting the individual; the works of Ibn Khaldun, Adam Ferguson, and Herbert Spencer. Though separated by time and culture, each thinker shares a common intuition: societies flourish through emergent order, not imposed design.

Ibn Khaldun

Modern readers are used to thinking of sociology as a nineteenth-​century invention pioneered by Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber. But long before European social science acquired departments of sociology, a fourteenth-​century Andalusian of Arab descent had already attempted something shockingly modern: to explain the laws of history, society, and state formation with systematic rigor. Ibn Khaldun called it his “new science.” In hindsight, it looks like an early example of sociology polygenesis as a discipline emerging from the confluence of economics, historiography, and demography.

Ibn Khaldun was born in Tunis in 1332, into an elite family that traced its lineage back to early Islam. But Ibn Khaldun also grew up surrounded by the ruins of former civilizations like Carthage and Rome. As he aged, it became harder to ignore that the glories of earlier Arab power had passed and that new forces were poised to reshape the region. He received a classical Islamic education: Qur’anic study, Arabic linguistics, and jurisprudence, along with logic, mathematics, and philosophy. Even a devout young Muslim could feel the weight of the Qur’anic idea that nations have terms, and when the term ends, it ends.

Then the Black Death struck. At seventeen, Ibn Khaldun watched plague devastate Tunis, killing family members and teachers, including his parents. He later described a civilization “visited by a destructive plague… which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish.” The catastrophe gave Ibn Khaldun the insight that social order is fragile, that demographics reshape everything, and that history is not a parade of great men but a churn of larger forces.

A STATEMAN’S EDUCATION IN POWER

Ibn Khaldun did not begin his career as a scholar. He entered politics young, moving through the bureaucratic world of courts and sultans, travelling to Tunis, Fez, Granada, back to North Africa, and later Cairo after taking posts, losing posts, switching patrons, negotiating, and scheming. Unlike many theorists, Ibn Khaldun saw states from the inside: he saw how incentives affected governance, how factions emerged, and their constant hunger for revenue and loyalty.

After years of wrangling among courts and desert tribes, he sought refuge in politics. Living among a Berber group gave him the peace to write in the town of Qalat Ibn Salama. There, he began his great history of the Arabs and Berbers, but first wrote what became the famous introduction: the Muqaddimah. In the 14th century, few historians before Ibn Khaldun felt obliged to explain their method.

THE CYCLE OF RISE AND DECAY

The Muqaddimah is best known for the cyclical theory of dynasties. Societies and states, he argues, move through phases like living organisms. A hardy group on the periphery unified by what he calls asabiyyah (social cohesion, group solidarity) can conquer a decadent urban society that has grown internally divided. But after victory, the conquerors settle into the comforts of urban life; luxury spreads, discipline decays, and political competence erodes. Within three or four generations, a new peripheral power emerges and the cycle repeats, or the empire fades, as Khaldun writes, “like a wick dying out in a lamp whose oil is gone.”

Ibn Khaldun rejects moralizing history and focuses on how changing conditions alter human behavior; how rulers become dependent on revenue; how armies transform from loyal followers into salaried professionals; how luxury breeds fragility; and how empires lose touch with the energies that once built it.

THE STATE, PROPERTY, AND ECONOMIC INCENTIVES

For readers interested in proto-​liberal themes, Khaldun is a goldmine; he anticipates arguments later treated as breakthroughs in policy.

Khaldun argues that human beings cannot live without social organization and that social organization requires coercive restraint. Without some mediator, people will take what they need by force; those attacked will retaliate, and violence escalates. The state emerges as a restraining power that makes social life possible. But crucially, once the state fails to protect property, economic life collapses. Attacks on property destroy incentives; enterprise withers; inactivity becomes general. The link between security and prosperity is explicit.

Khaldun describes the division of labor as an essential part of civilized life. Even producing bread requires cooperation across skilled trades: planting and harvesting, milling, kneading, baking, toolmaking, and pottery. Through cooperation, he says, the needs of many more people can be satisfied than their number would suggest.

Finally, he delivers one of the most famous observations in the history of public finance: taxation behaves perversely over time. Early in a dynasty, low assessments can yield high revenue because economic activity is vigorous and incentives remain intact. Late in a dynasty, rulers push taxation “beyond the limits of equity,” and high assessments yield low revenue because production contracts and people stop bothering. It’s not a moral complaint; it’s a mechanism. Raise extraction too far, and you shrink the base you’re extracting from.

A COMPLICATED HERO

It’s important not to falsify Khaldun into a patron saint of modern liberty. He was a devout, strict Muslim aristocrat. He distrusted commerce and preferred an austere life. His social attitudes were those of his era in their harshest form.

Yet Ibn Khaldun was both deeply of his time and far ahead of it. His concepts of social cohesion, state formation, predation, incentives, and cyclical decay became foundational building blocks for later social theory, including arguments used in the liberal case against arbitrary power.

Adam Ferguson

Where Ibn Khaldun treats social order as a fragile achievement threatened by decadence, the Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Ferguson made a different observation, explaining how order can arise without architects. Through custom, commerce, and unintended consequences, an organized society emerges without design.

Adam Ferguson (1723–1816) sits in a peculiar place in the Scottish Enlightenment. He’s often grouped with David Hume and Adam Smith as a theorist of modern commercial society, but Ferguson’s instincts were never purely urbane. He grew up in Perthshire on the border of Lowlands and Highlands, close enough to see both faces of Scotland: the polished world of letters, and the rougher, older world of clan life based on military virtue and ties of loyalty. Many Enlightenment thinkers were city creatures; Ferguson’s vantage point made him unusually attentive to conflict.

Ferguson was born into the Scottish gentry, a respectable lineage, but one of limited means. His father, also Adam Ferguson, served as a parish minister, and the family lived in genteel poverty: enough status to expect an education, not enough wealth to make life secure. Ferguson attended the grammar school St Andrews, then Edinburgh, studying Latin and Greek alongside mathematics and moral philosophy.

He initially expected to follow his father into the church, but while studying in Edinburgh, Ferguson was offered a chaplaincy in the Black Watch, a Highland regiment raised to serve Britain’s military. He was an obvious fit: he spoke Scots Gaelic and understood Highland culture from the inside. By 1746, he rose to principal chaplain. Unlike Hume and Smith, Ferguson was comfortable with the military life, which never fully left him. Even after leaving the regiment in 1754, his writings retained a soldier’s obsession with discipline, civic virtue, and the difference between a free people and a pacified population.

That military background fed directly into Ferguson’s first major public intervention: Reflections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia. There, he argued that a militia was preferable to a professional standing army, not merely for strategic reasons, but because militias cultivate the civic virtue that makes liberty durable. A paid army may defend a state; a citizen militia helps defend a people.

After his military service, Ferguson transitioned into teaching and letters, moving through elite networks while never quite becoming rich. He entered the University of Edinburgh as professor of natural philosophy, then, more fittingly, in 1764 as professor of moral philosophy. He read voraciously across ancient and modern sources.

CIVIL SOCIETY

Ferguson’s signature achievement, though, is his Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), a work of “philosophical history” that we would now call a form of proto-​sociology. Here, Ferguson tries to explain how societies form, change, and decay. Ferguson was, in many respects, a friend of modernity. He appreciated expanding legal protections, property rights, freer speech, and the stabilization of law after Britain’s constitutional settlement. But unlike the more buoyant Enlightenment story of inevitable progress, Ferguson insisted that developed societies can regress. History is not a guaranteed upward slope; it is open-​ended, contingent, and reversible.

That skepticism rests on Ferguson’s idea of human nature. Humans are restless. They fight, trade, compete, and seek novelty. They do their best work under pressure; they also grow complacent under comfort. Ferguson was suspicious of the static “social contract” theories that dominated early modern theory. Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jacques Rousseau each had a version of a founding agreement to justify a preferred regime. Ferguson thought states and governments do not arise from explicit contracts but from the internal development of social life itself—through the slow accretion of habits, norms, associations, and conflicts. In other words, society is not created by a legislator; it grows on its own accord.

This leads to Ferguson’s most enduring idea: civil society and spontaneous order. Civil society, for Ferguson, names the realm of institutions and associations that are neither state bureaucracy nor private enterprise. It includes schools, churches, universities, clubs, voluntary groups, and informal networks of mutual aid. It is the social tissue that makes a free society possible because it coordinates action without centralized coercion. People pursue their own goals associated with status, faith, knowledge, friendship, and profit. By doing so, they generate shared norms and stable expectations that no one designed in advance.

Ferguson captures the logic with the line later canonized by Hayek: nations “stumble upon establishments” that are “the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.” Order emerges without architects; institutions evolve without a master plan; and attempts to replace evolved norms with rational blueprints often destroy the conditions they depend on.

Finally, Ferguson adds a third theme that keeps him distinct from his contemporaries: conflict as a driver of social and legal evolution. Drawing on Polybius, Tacitus, and Machiavelli, he argues that stable liberty is not created by a perfect constitution written once and for all. It is maintained through contestation. Humans are motivated by “union and opposition.” Conflict can be destructive, but it can also be adaptive. A free society is not a harmonious machine; it is a vast and complex ecosystem.

In the end, Ferguson belongs to the sociology of freedom: a thinker who saw that modern liberty depends less on abstract rights, but on evolved institutions, civil society, and the disciplined virtues that keep political power at arm’s length.

Herbert Spencer

Where Ferguson explains how order and liberty arise from civil society and unintended consequences, Herbert Spencer systematized that insight into a full theory of social evolution, mainly tracing the shift from coercive “military” societies to cooperative “industrial” ones.

In the late nineteenth century, he was one of the most famous intellectuals on earth. His works were read obsessively in England, America, India, Japan, China, Turkey, and beyond. Spencer sold over a million copies while alive, a rare achievement for works on political philosophy even now. But his reputation collapsed as the twentieth century arrived. 

Herbert Spencer’s reputation declined in the first half of the twentieth century as progressive reformers and emerging welfare-​state advocates increasingly associated his evolutionary individualism with indifference to poverty. The rise of new intellectual movements such as professionalized sociology, pragmatism, analytic philosophy, and Keynesian economics rendered Spencer’s grand synthetic system unfashionable, casting him as a relic of Victorian optimism. Despite his decline in popularity, Spencer remains worth reading today for his analysis of how concentrated political power distorts social evolution and for his sustained defense of voluntary association as the moral foundation of a free society.

His core argument, from youth to old age, was that social progress depends on the reduction of coercion and the expansion of peaceful cooperation. Spencer tried to integrate political economy, social evolution, ethics, and institutional analysis into a single explanatory framework.

Spencer was born April 27, 1820, in Derby, an industrializing town in England’s Midlands. He was the eldest of nine children; tragically, seven died in infancy, and the remaining sibling died before age three, leaving Spencer effectively raised as an only child. His family were dissenters, radical nonconformists, suspicious of all official authority. His father was a teacher and raised his son to question inherited status and ecclesiastical hierarchy.

A crucial influence arrived at thirteen, when Spencer was sent to be educated by his uncle Thomas Spencer, a clergyman with liberal leanings involved in anti–Corn Law agitation and reformist politics. Under Thomas, Spencer absorbed a style of middle-​class radicalism oriented around self-​reliance and an early free-​trade view on political questions. Before he was sixteen, Spencer was publishing essays on topics like salt crystallization and Poor Law reform, an early signal that Spencer would never stay in one discipline.

He began his working life as a schoolteacher, then shifted into civil engineering on Britain’s expanding railways. Engineering trained Spencer to think in systems, incentives, and constraints. Railway work inadvertently introduced Spencer to the discipline of geology, fossils, and the long arc of natural change. Reading Lyell’s Principles of Geology, Spencer became convinced that the development from simple to complex was the master pattern not only of biology but of society. Seven years before Darwin’s Origin, Spencer published “The Development Hypothesis,” rejecting the theistic doctrine of special creation and arguing that evolution was the most plausible account of life’s diversity.

Spencer’s first major political statement came early: “The Proper Sphere of Government” (1842). He argued the government exists to administer justice, to protect persons and property. It does not exist to regulate commerce, educate, dispense charity, or manage the spiritual life. He observed that a state that tries to do everything must eventually coerce everyone. From youth, Spencer also held a deep hostility to war, insisting that the true sources of wealth are “industry and commerce, science and the arts,” not invasions that enrich aristocrats while bleeding society of wealth.

By the late 1840s, Spencer worked at The Economist, where he encountered Thomas Hodgskin, the radical critic of exploitation and state privilege. In 1851, Spencer published Social Statics, an ambitious work that mixes ethics, politics, and a philosophy of human development. Its cornerstone is the law of equal freedom; that every person may exercise their faculties to their full potential, so long as they do not infringe the equal freedom of others. Rights, in this scheme, are not mystical gifts; they are corollaries of a principle meant to maximize flourishing by minimizing coercion. In his younger, more optimistic phase, Spencer even entertained the “right to ignore the state.”

Spencer’s critique of intervention sharpened in essays like “Over-​Legislation” (1853). Here the argument is recognizably Hayekian. Officials do not possess the knowledge required to manage complex social life; political remedies often worsen the original problem and generate new harms through unintended consequences. Bureaucracies operate under monopoly conditions and rarely face genuine feedback or replacement. Markets, for all their failures, are disciplined by information and profit; firms can go bust, but states tend to persist.

SOCIOLOGY

Though Spencer is popular amongst classical liberals and libertarians mainly for his political philosophy, Spencer’s largest and most pronounced impact has been on the discipline of sociology. In the 1870s, Herbert Spencer began the task of writing the monumental 2,240-page, three-​volume Principles of Sociology. In Spencer’s day, sociology was in its infancy. Though Spencer is rarely mentioned in sociology textbooks today, he made massive contributions that helped legitimize and popularize sociology as a serious discipline. In Principles of Sociology, Spencer examined every major aspect of human society from an evolutionary perspective.

His famous contrast militant versus industrial captures a broad historical drift from social organization through force supported by hierarchy, compulsion, and status, toward organization by contract mediated through exchange and decentralization. Industrial society, at its best, expands voluntary association; while the militant society glorifies the centralization of power and war. Throughout his life, Spencer feared European powers regressing to militant societies.

Spencer popularized sociology as a serious enterprise before it became professionalized. Principles of Sociology and the rest of his works were translated across Europe and into Asian languages, where he was read as a guide to modernization and reform. In Meiji Japan, for example, Spencer’s work circulated widely among liberals grappling with the transition from feudal order to constitutional politics. In Egypt and India, Spencer’s anti-​imperial and anti-​militarist themes were attractive precisely because British rule had created educated classes who could now turn liberal arguments against the empire itself. The Indian radical and advocate of independence Shyamji Krishnavarma’s journal The Indian Sociologist, put Spencer’s law of equal freedom on its masthead as a statement of political principle and moral legitimacy.

He did more than any other singular figure of the 19th century to help advance the popularization of sociology as a serious discipline.

Conclusion

Taken together, Ibn Khaldun, Adam Ferguson, and Herbert Spencer reveal a forgotten sociology that is neither collectivist nor managerial. Khaldun shows how incentives can hollow out civilizations from within. Ferguson explains how order arises through civil society and habitual cooperation, not legislative genius. Spencer systematizes these insights into a general theory of social evolution that links freedom with the decline of coercion.

For libertarians, sociology can serve not as a blueprint for social engineering but as a discipline of humility. At its best, it maps the unintended consequences of power, traces the informal norms that sustain cooperation, and reveals the delicate moral and institutional preconditions of a free society. A libertarian lens for sociology would study how trust emerges, how voluntary associations coordinate dispersed knowledge, how overregulation corrodes civic responsibility, and how extractive political incentives undermine productive order. Properly understood, sociology does not compete with liberty; it deepens further.

Sociology need not be the enemy of liberty. It becomes an enemy only when it forgets its own origins. Recovered in its older form, sociology does not ask how to manage society. It asks why societies work at all and in dire situations why they stop working altogether. In an age of excessive government control, the questions these early pioneers of sociology asked are more relevant now than ever before.