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Did Ibn Khaldun really say that labour is the source of value?

Youssef Berrada Fellow
· 4 replies
Economy & workIslamicModern EuropeanAdam SmithIbn Khaldun#anachronism#ibn-khaldun#labour-theory-of-value#muqaddimah
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Every year at least one of my students comes back from the internet with the claim that Ibn Khaldun "invented the labour theory of value four centuries before Adam Smith and Marx". It's said with pride, and I share the pride, but I don't want to teach a slogan.

I know the relevant section is in the fifth chapter of the Muqaddimah, on the ways people make a living. I have the Arabic and Rosenthal's English. What I'd like is someone with economics training to explain: what exactly does he say about labour and value? How close is it to Smith or Marx? And where does the comparison mislead?

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4 answers

Accepted answer

  1. Javier Ferrandis

    ✓ Accepted answer Fellow

    Youssef, I keep the Muqaddimah next to Capital on my shelf, so this is my favourite question.

    What he says: in the chapter on livelihood, Ibn Khaldun argues that profit and gain are, wholly or mostly, the value realised from human labour. Even where the source seems natural, like crops watered by rain or minerals, he insists labour is involved in making them available, and its contribution is just less visible. He distinguishes sustenance (rizq), what actually benefits you, from acquisition (kasb), what you gain through your own effort. He also connects labour to the prosperity of cities: where there is much labour and specialisation, there is wealth and luxury; where population and cooperation decline, crafts and gains decline too.

    How close: very close to the core intuition of the classical labour theory, that labour is what creates value. Arguably closer to Smith, who also tied the division of labour to the wealth of societies, than to Marx.

    Where it misleads: Marx's theory is about how value under capitalism is measured by socially necessary labour time and how surplus value is extracted. Nothing like that machinery is in Ibn Khaldun, and it couldn't be; he wasn't analysing wage labour under capitalism. So "he anticipated the intuition" is fair. "He invented Marx's theory" is not.

    Helpful · 1

Other answers

  1. Zainab Kadhim

    Fellow

    A bookseller's addition. In the same chapter on crafts he discusses the craft of book production, the copyists and binders, and connects its flourishing to the size and wealth of cities. He observes that when a city declines, its crafts and its books decline with it. I find that more striking than the theory: he saw that even knowledge depends on the labour of people nobody remembers.

    Helpful · 2
  2. Hamza Qureshi

    Fellow

    From the legal side: the classical jurists had developed a detailed law of hire and wages (ijāra) well before him, so the idea that labour is something with a determinable value had a long life in fiqh. Ibn Khaldun's originality is in turning it into a general explanation of wealth and civilisation, not in noticing that work has value.

    Helpful · 3
  3. Youssef Berrada

    Fellow

    This is exactly what I'll teach. Pride in the intuition, honesty about the differences, and Zainab's copyists as the example of how much ordinary labour is hidden in a library.