Group solidarity builds a dynasty; prosperity erodes that solidarity, and dynasties ordinarily become senile over about three generations.
Ibn Khaldun wrote it in 1377 from observation of North African dynasties: desert tribes conquer cities, and city life dissolves the solidarity that enabled the conquest. He gives three generations, roughly 120 years, as the ordinary span, with ancestral prestige destroyed in the fourth.
In practice
- A family firm's founder is frugal, the son is competent, the grandson is a collector, and the fourth generation sells.
- A political movement bound by a shared enemy fragments within a decade of winning, having lost the thing that held it.
- Standing
- Also anticipates the Laffer curve and the three-generation wealth adage.
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- How societies hold together, sort people, and change