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Reading group: Ibn Khaldun on making a living, crafts and taxes in the Muqaddimah

Youssef Berrada Fellow
· 5 replies
Economy & workAfrican & AfricanaIslamicIbn Khaldun#crafts#labour-and-value#muqaddimah#taxation
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Its coordinates: 6.5 Philosophy of Economics · 6.22 Philosophy of Work

Ibn Khaldun spent formative years at the Marinid court here in Fes. His Muqaddimah (1377) is famous for its theory of the rise and fall of dynasties, but the chapters on economic life are often skipped, and I think they're among the most original parts of the book.

Text. Franz Rosenthal's three-volume translation is the complete one; N. J. Dawood's one-volume abridgement is fine if you can't get it, though it cuts some sections. Arabic readers can use any good edition.

Plan (four sittings, two weeks each):
1. The opening sections of Chapter Five: what gain and livelihood are, and the claim that profit is the value realised from human labour.
2. The ways of making a living (agriculture, crafts, commerce) and his frank remarks on what each does to character.
3. The crafts: why they need teachers and large, settled populations, and why they decline when a civilisation does.
4. Back to Chapter Three for taxation: his argument that at the beginning of a dynasty small assessments bring large revenues, and that later large assessments bring small ones.

Let's resist the temptation to call him "the father of economics". He was doing something else, a science of human society and civilisation, and the economic chapters make most sense inside that. Bring questions, objections and local examples.

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5 replies

  1. Javier Ferrandis

    Fellow

    Sitting 1. The labour theory of value is there, as people say, but it's embedded in a theory of social production: labour produces value because people cooperate in cities, and the size and wealth of a civilisation determine what labour can earn. Smith has a version of that. Marx, who did put labour at the centre, came to it through very different sources. Youssef is right that "father of economics" flattens what's distinctive.

  2. Zainab Kadhim

    Fellow

    Sitting 2. His remarks on merchants made me laugh and wince. He says, roughly, that commerce requires a kind of cleverness and haggling that doesn't sit well with nobility of character. As a bookseller on Mutanabbi Street, I've bargained all my life and I'm not sure my character has suffered. But I've met traders whose has.

    Helpful · 1
  3. Mona Fathy

    Fellow

    Sitting 3. The chapters on crafts include writing, book production and the sciences: crafts too, needing teachers and cities. In the next chapter he says the sciences multiply where civilisation is large and disappear when it shrinks. Working in a library in Alexandria, I find that both proud and frightening. Knowledge is not a possession that survives on its own; it's a craft that needs a city to practise it.

    Helpful · 2
  4. Youssef Berrada

    Fellow

    Sitting 4, and thank you all. The taxation argument is the part economists still cite, sometimes far too neatly. What I find more striking is the reason he gives: when rulers become luxurious and raise taxes, people lose the incentive to work and build, revenue falls, and the dynasty raises taxes further. It's an argument about morale and trust as much as arithmetic, and it sits inside his larger story about ʿaṣabiyya weakening.

    Helpful · 3
  5. Hicham Ouazzani

    Fellow

    Late to this, but I read sitting 3 in my workshop. He's right that a craft needs a teacher and a city. My father taught me cedar ceilings in a city that still wants them; in towns that don't, the craft has died in one generation. What he doesn't say is that the knowledge lives in the hands, not only in the city. When I carve, I'm not following a rule I could write down.