Arab political theory conceptualized government as a circular chain of interdependent parts

Evidence

The eight words denoted the eight parts of the political world, with the meaning of each one interpreted in terms of the next: ’… the sovereign is an order supported by soldiers, the soldiers are assistants sustained by means of wealth, wealth is nourishment gathered by the subjects’ and so on, so that ‘each term is tied to the next and the last returns to the first, joining them in a circle whose end is not marked’. The circle derives from the same origins as Aristotle’s golden octagon, but the source for Arab scholars of the nineteenth century was the work of the great fourteenth-century North African writer, Ibn Khaldun. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 425

Categorization

• XREF: This circular conception of authority resonates with my ‘Grafting & Growth’ piece, where natural systems are also understood as interlocking circular dependencies rather than hierarchies.
• DEFINE: Defines the ‘ring of eight words’ — the circle-of-political-parts framework that structured Arab political thought into the 19th century.