The purpose of this translation of Heinrich Simons's Ibn Khalduns Wissenschaft Vonder Menschlichen Kultur (leipzig,1959) is to make Ibn Khaldun's ideas and contributions more accessible. Many of his ideas are astonishigly similar to those of Machiavelli, Vico, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and even Karl Marx. The title of the book is self explanatory, and , as simon puts it, "it is indeed Ibn Khaldun's merit to have made human society the subject of a new , separate science.
Ibn Khaldun was a fourteenth-century historiographer and sociologist living in North Africa, studied the changing facet of Arab civilizations of his time and phased out this study of change in terms of social behavior.