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A Social Well-Being Function: A social well-being function is an objective criterion of the socio-scientific order existing, first, as a result of the underlying set of cause-effect interrelationships between a science of culture and the social-political-institutional order. Here we have the causality arising from interrelationships pertaining to the social well-being goal. Second, the attained levels of the social well-being function in turn regenerates a new set of socioscientific interrelationships. This assumes the nature of "effects" in the total set of cause-effect interrelationships. Because of continuous evolution between these two sides in a simulative scale, we refer to the generic interrelationships as cause-effect. Socioscientific Order: Finally, the reader will note my use of the term socioscientific order that transcends the limited domain of the social-political-institutional order underlying cultural dynamics. The meaning here, once again arising from the underlying set of cause-effect interrelationships, is taken up at the level of invoking a definite epistemology that becomes pervasive in the entire system of interrelationships. Such a universal explanatory power thus does not differentiate between systems. It remains uniquely analytical in all of them. Rejecting Pluralism in the Study of Cultural Dynamics: Since our major focus in this paper is to study the unity-based category of formalism in the dynamics of culture, we will now quickly negate the approaches of the science of culture according to Ibn Khaldun (umran) and atomism according to Hegel and others. Ibn Khaldun's Science of Culture: Ibn Khaldun, a fourteenth-century historiographer and sociologist living in North Africa, studied the changing facet of Arab civilizations of his time and phased out this study of change in terms of social behavior. He then tried to extend this ontological analysis to all categories of historiography.9 Ibn Khaldun starts from the early stage of any civilization whose integrity and prosperity he discerns in terms of religious and tribal solidarity found in simple primitive social context ('asabiyya). The science of culture for Ibn Khaldun becomes the human propensity toward frugal living and solidarity gained from religious and tribal habits. Ibn Khaldun then traces the subsequent development of Arab civilization and finds that as prosperity grows and the pamper of life increases with growing complexity of social, economic, and political structures, the solidarity disappears and cultural disintegration takes place. This is reflected in wasteful consumption habits and in social ills and weaknesses arising from corrupt administration and evasion of holy wars. Ibn Khaldun associates rationalism with the decline of civilization and social corruption. He argues that a rationalist regime cannot lead to honesty and social integrity because it is motivated by personal gains and is premised on knowledge devoid of Godly knowledge. Ibn Khaldun thus associates the good cultural life with the interrelationship that must be established between God, the world, and the Hereafter. Although this is seen to be the best path for human progress, Ibn Khaldun finds that most regimes remain rationalist and not Godly. Hence, Ibn Khaldun focuses principally on the study of historiography based on rationalist forces. Several problems can be associated with Ibn Khaldun's cultural analysis of causally integrated social-political-institutional dynamics. We take up a few here. First, Ibn Khaldun's cultural analysis is not methodologically circular toward establishing a cause-effect interrelationship. Hence, while studying historiography he cannot find either abiding or reversible ethical factors that can continue to abide in the most technologically advanced societies and at all stages of social transformation. Ibn Khaldun's historiography is thereby based on one-directional causality-from cultural disintegration to civilizational decadence. Second, Ibn Khaldun's emphasis on the causality between God (Allah), the Hereafter (al-akhira), and the world (al-dunya)-one that is found in Islamic scholasticism and religious scholarship10-cannot be explained at a methodological level. The cause-effect interrelationship among these domains remains unexplained; it is simply stated as fact. Hence, the endogenous role of morality and ethics as epistemological forces remains unexplained. The last observation leads to the third problem in Ibn Khaldun's science of culture. Methodology remains subservient to the epistemological conception of perfection developed by Plato and Aristotle, and thus the world is seen from this perspective. Consequently, for Ibn Khaldun as for the Greek thinkers, the meaning of ethics and morality remains numinous and outside human explanation. The central meaning of ethics and morality as endogenous knowledge in all systems of human action cannot be invoked. However, the Islamic religious thinkers called the mutakallimun. have a much different approach to such issues. Consequently, we find that it is the exogenous nature of ethics and morality, and hence the distancing of God and Unity in "systemic" studies, that makes Ibn Khaldun's science of culture incapable of explaining the cultural dynamics of a social-political-institutional, socioeconomic whole. The result is the failure in conceptualizing a social well-being functional in the milieu of the ethical and moral interrelationships with the social-political-institutional entirety. This latter case again is left to the Islamic scholars, particularly Imam Ghazzali, Imam Malik, and Imam Shatibi.11 
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