Ibn Khaldoun
Civilisations rise and fall with the strength of their solidarity.
Misconceptions
Ibn Khaldun invented the Laffer curve.
The idea is indeed his: at the beginning of a dynasty, light taxes bring in a lot; at the end, heavy taxes bring in little, because people stop undertaking anything. But he draws no curve and looks for no ideal rate: he describes the ageing of a state that taxes more and more to pay for its luxury. The name "Laffer curve" dates from the 1970s; Ronald Reagan (in 1981), then Arthur Laffer himself, quoted Ibn Khaldun in support of tax cuts.
Ibn Khaldun is the father of sociology.
He knows he is founding a "new science" with its own object: civilisation, that is, human society. And he explains social facts by causes, as sociology would. But the label is modern (the word "sociology" dates from the 19th century), his first aim is to criticise historians' reports, and his explanations mix observation, climate, the medicine of his time and religion. A remarkable forerunner rather than a direct father: the European founders of sociology had not read him.
Ibn Khaldun despised the Arabs.
His judgements are harsh: wherever "the Arabs" rule, he writes, ruin comes quickly, because they plunder and do not govern. But he defines these "Arabs" by a way of life: they are the camel nomads of the desert, like the nomadic Berbers, the Kurds or the Turkmens. He has before his eyes the Bedouin tribes that had ravaged the Maghreb since the 11th century. He himself claimed Arab descent, and he writes elsewhere that no people was as quick to accept religious truth, nor founded such great empires. Some 20th-century Arab readers nevertheless accused him of contempt: the debate is about the exact meaning of the word.
By explaining peoples through climate, Ibn Khaldun escaped the prejudices of his time.
Only in part. He rejects the explanation of his time that Black people descend from Ham, cursed by Noah: the Torah, he notes, says nothing about colour, and skin colour comes from climate, to the point of changing within a few generations when a people migrates. But the same reasoning from climate leads him to degrading judgements: he writes that the Black peoples of the hottest lands have qualities of character "close to those of dumb animals" (he says the same of the Slavs of the far North), and that they submit to slavery because they have "little that is essentially human". These pages repeat the prejudices of a world where the trade in African slaves was common. They are false and must be read as such, without being hidden. The old translations quoted here use the words of their time.