How are we to conceive of the genealogy of the state without reducing tribal societies to the status of ancestors of state societies? It is the genealogy of political power that is at stake in this question. In Ibn Khaldûn's work, power is an integral part of an ontology that anchors the political in the biological. When Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari come up against the radical separation between state societies and stateless societies, which they perceive in Pierre Clastres’ work, (...) they borrow the concept of group feeling from Ibn Khaldûn, which allows them to posit the relationship between states and what is external to them. This article identifies an anthropology of power in Ibn Khaldûn in order to better understand his role in Mille Plateaux by Deleuze and Guattari. (shrink)