Civilisations do not collapse when they become wealthy. They collapse when wealth has dissolved the cohesion that made wealth possible.
Modern history is usually narrated as progress: each generation inherits more technology, institutions, and material capacity than the last. That story misses the recurrent problem beneath visible expansion. The same success that enlarges a civilisation can separate its people from the hardship, discipline, and shared purpose that created it.
The civilisation cycle is most clearly associated with Ibn Khaldun’s account of dynastic rise and decline in the Muqaddimah (1377). A group bound by strong asabiyyah, or collective solidarity, forms the force needed to conquer, govern, and build. Once established, the ruling group moves into settled life. Wealth, luxury, bureaucracy, and dependence on institutions gradually weaken the solidarity that carried it to power. A new group, usually formed under harder conditions at the periphery, eventually possesses the cohesion to replace it.
This is not a claim that every society follows an identical timetable, nor that decline is caused by luxury alone. It is a structural pattern: capacity is converted into comfort, comfort reduces interdependence, and reduced interdependence makes the system increasingly dependent on coercion and administration. The outer form survives for a while after the inner force has gone.
The cycle is useful because it shifts diagnosis away from the moral failure of isolated individuals. A civilisation’s question is not simply whether its people are comfortable, but whether comfort has severed them from responsibility, shared meaning, and the capacity to act together. Renewal therefore requires more than growth. It requires the reconstruction of the cohesion on which durable order depends.
Sources: Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah (1377); Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Ibn Khaldun” and “The Muqaddimah”; Universitas Islam Internasional Indonesia, “Cycle of Civilization.”