School of Thought: Ibn Khaldun

'School of Thought’ is the IEA discussion series based on ‘101 Great Liberal Thinkers’ by Dr Eamonn Butler. Each week, Syed Kamall, IEA Research Director, will discuss classical liberalism’s role in bringing the modern world into existence, profiling the lives and ideas of some of the leading thinkers on individual liberty and examining their relevance today. In this week’s episode, Syed sits down with Benedikt Koehler, an economist and historian of economic thought in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, to discuss Ibn Khaldun. Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) understood how exploitation, by governments or others, was a huge disincentive against work, saving and progress. He wrote “[a]ttacks on people’s property remove the incentive to acquire and gain property. People then conclude that the only result of acquiring property is for it to be taken away again. When the incentive to acquire property is gone, people no longer make efforts to acquire it. The extent and degree to which property rights are infringed upon determines the extent and degree to which the efforts of the subjects to acquire property slacken.”