Prosperity, Affordability, and ʿasabiyya

 The recent emergence of “affordability” as a dominant term in American political discourse is neither accidental nor merely rhetorical. Its rapid ascent followed the inflationary shock of the COVID-19 pandemic and the cascading economic disruptions that accompanied it: housing instability, supply-chain fragmentation, stagnant real wages, and the widening gap between nominal income and the cost of living. However, the political salience of affordability extends beyond macroeconomic indicators. Its growing prominence signals a deeper structural shift: the search for a new conceptual system capable of restoring coherence between governing institutions and the lived material realities of citizens. What registers on the surface as a policy priority or campaign slogan may therefore reflect a more consequential transformation in the conceptual foundations through which political legitimacy and collective social purpose are organized.

Such a shift cannot be adequately captured through conventional political economy or electoral analysis alone. It requires a framework capable of explaining how societies generate emotionally binding systems of meaning that sustain collective organization, institutional loyalty, and civilizational continuity. It is here that the thought of Ibn Khaldūn (1332–1406) becomes analytically productive. Modern scholarship frequently translates his central concept, ʿaṣabiyya, as “social cohesion,” “group feeling,” or “tribal solidarity.” While these renderings capture part of his meaning, they often remain overly localized, treating the concept primarily as a sociological descriptor of Arab, Amazigh, or nomadic communities (Baali 1988; Al-Azmeh 1982). This interpretive tendency conflates Ibn Khaldūn’s historical illustrations with the conceptual principle itself. As he makes clear in al-Muqaddima, his project was not ethnographic but civilizational: he drew upon the societies around him as empirical case studies from which broader principles of state formation, legitimacy, and collective organization could be extracted.

Understood at this level of abstraction, ʿaṣabiyya is not reducible to kinship or tribalism. It functions as a universalizing principle through which multiplicity is transformed into collective agency. It is the binding mechanism that enables scattered individuals to become historically effective; the affective infrastructure that generates identification with a shared order, organizes sacrifice, sustains institutions, and produces commitment powerful enough to compel individuals to defend a system, and importantly, to reproduce it. The medieval societies Ibn Khaldūn observed expressed this energy through tribal confederations, dynastic projects, and religious movements, but the principle itself transcends those particular historical forms.

To grasp the depth of Ibn Khaldūn’s concept, it is necessary to move beyond modern sociological translations and attend to the lexical architecture of the term. ʿAṣabiyya derives from the Arabic triliteral root ʿ-ṣ-b (عصب), whose semantic field, as documented in classical lexicons such as Ibn Manẓūr’s Lisān al-ʿArab and Lane’s Arabic-English Lexicon, revolves around binding, fastening, structural attachment, and muscular or nervous tension. From this root emerge terms for tendons, ligaments, emotional agitation, partisan attachment, and militant solidarity. The semantic continuity is interpretively revealing: in classical Arabic, bodily tension, affective excitation, and social attachment are not isolated domains but share a common conceptual matrix grounded in binding and intensified connection. This etymological density suggests that ʿaṣabiyya cannot be reduced to the thin modern notion of “solidarity.” Rather, it evokes a condition in which attachment becomes affective, reflexive, and socially embodied. Just as nerves transmit sensation and tendons coordinate muscular force, ʿaṣabiyya describes the mechanism through which societies transform emotional identification into coordinated collective action.

Such a reading is methodologically reinforced when one considers Ibn Khaldūn’s sociolinguistic environment. Though he wrote in refined classical Arabic, he operated within the multilingual, orally saturated world of the medieval Maghrib, where Arabic, Amazigh languages, tribal dialects, and vernacular political cultures interacted continuously. While direct textual evidence of vernacular influence on his theoretical vocabulary remains limited, it is methodologically problematic to assume that his conceptual apparatus emerged exclusively from formal literary lexicons detached from lived speech communities. In premodern Islamic contexts, writing frequently functioned as an aid to oral preservation rather than its replacement; the Qurʾānic tradition itself demonstrates that memorization, recitation, and performative transmission historically carried greater epistemic authority than textual possession alone. Consequently, the emotional, confrontational, and mobilizational dimensions associated with derivatives of ʿ-ṣ-b in North African vernacular usage should not be dismissed as semantic corruption. They may instead preserve affective registers that literary Arabic formalized but did not erase.

Given that Ibn Khaldun was very carefully deliberate in choosing key technical terms, this contextual and lexical grounding helps explain why Ibn Khaldūn’s deployment of ʿaṣabiyya consistently carries undertones of mobilization, political transformation, sacrifice, and dynastic consolidation rather than passive cohesion. His concept describes a socially binding force potent enough to generate states, sustain legitimacy, organize collective struggle, and ultimately determine civilizational trajectories. Crucially, however, Ibn Khaldūn also theorized its decay: as ʿaṣabiyya routinizes into institutional comfort, luxury, and excess, its binding intensity diminishes, leaving political orders vulnerable to external challenge and, importantly, internal fragmentation.

When understood at this level of abstraction, ʿaṣabiyya becomes a productive heuristic for analyzing modern political economies. Contemporary systems continuously attempt to generate and sustain emotionally binding conceptual orders around which collective attachment and institutional loyalty can be organized. In the postwar United States, “prosperity” functioned as precisely such a conceptual center. It was not merely an economic metric but a civilizational narrative: the belief that participation in the American social contract would reliably produce upward mobility, material abundance, and expanding opportunity. Anchored in Keynesian demand management, suburban expansion, labor-management compacts, and the GI Bill, this narrative sustained generational commitment to markets, welfare structures, and democratic institutions (Bell 1960; Rodgers 2011). Prosperity operated as a secularized form of ʿaṣabiyya: a shared promise that bound diverse populations to a common political order.

However, when material conditions increasingly diverged from lived experience--through deindustrialization, financialization, housing unaffordability, wage stagnation, post-pandemic inflation, and heavy debt--the integrative force of the prosperity narrative weakened. Under such conditions, political systems seek alternative conceptual systems capable of restoring coherence between institutional expectations and social reality, reestablishing the necessary duality of conceptual—praxeological systems, where the former captures the idea, the narrative, the norm; while the latter encompasses the action, the behavioral, the material. The growing emphasis on “affordability” reflects precisely such a discursive and political transition. Affordability is not merely a policy category or cost-of-living index. It is emerging as a candidate for a reconstructed binding value around which political legitimacy, collective expectation, and social coordination may be reorganized. Unlike prosperity, which promised expansion, affordability promises viability. It lowers the threshold of collective aspiration from accumulation to sustainability, from growth to survivability. Precisely because it speaks directly to immediate material conditions, it possesses significant affective and mobilizational potential in contemporary electoral and policy discourse.

Methodologically, applying Ibn Khaldūn’s framework to modern liberal democracies requires careful qualification. Khaldunian theory emerged in a premodern context marked by dynastic cycles, religious legitimacy, and explicit martial mobilization—conditions that do not map neatly onto pluralistic, bureaucratic, and rights-based modern states. The analogy between ʿaṣabiyya and contemporary economic discourse is therefore not structural but analytical. It draws on conceptual history (Koselleck 2002) and political sociology to examine how economic terminology acquires civilizational weight, organizes collective expectation, and sustains or erodes institutional legitimacy. Modern societies do not possess ʿaṣabiyya in Ibn Khaldūn’s exact sense; rather, they continuously produce, weaken, replace, and compete over functional equivalents that perform similar integrative work. The conceptual systems around which societies emotionally organize themselves may shift—religion, nationalism, prosperity, security, freedom, affordability—but the underlying civilizational process of generating, sustaining, and losing collective binding force remains analytically recognizable.

The enduring value of Ibn Khaldūn’s thought lies not in its historical particularity but in its capacity to illuminate the mechanics of collective purpose, institutional legitimacy, and civilizational resilience. Once ʿaṣabiyya is understood not as tribal solidarity narrowly conceived, but as the dynamic process through which societies construct emotionally binding conceptual orders, his framework becomes a productive lens for diagnosing the crises and transformations of the modern political economy. It reminds scholars and policymakers alike that political legitimacy is never sustained by material conditions alone, but by the narratives that make those conditions collectively meaningful. In an era marked by institutional distrust, economic precarity, and discursive fragmentation, revisiting Khaldunian questions about what binds societies together—and what causes those bonds to fray—may be more urgent than ever.