Muqaddimah, Adam Smith & Intellectual Heritage
Most people know Adam Smith as the father of economics, but sadly, far fewer have heard of Ibn Khaldun. Born in 1332, this North African Arab scholar, judge, and diplomat laid the foundations for the law of supply and demand and the labor theory of value some 500 years before Smith. Placing them side-by-side reveals that the formation of an idea is never a singular and isolated event.
Since my time in Beijing, I have traveled to the Middle East at least once a year to satiate my fascination with Arab academics and history. I learned that many of these thinkers were the unrecognized predecessors of Western scholars. Sadly, much of their intellectual heritage has been erased from modern textbooks, and facts have been misrepresented. Many concepts we use today have been misattributed entirely to Western thinkers, perhaps simply because the original texts were written in Arabic and remained untranslated in Europe for centuries.
I often joke with my friends about the provenance of ideas, using the analogy of mathematical relationships in nature: everything respects the laws of physics, with or without a human language to describe it. The same applies to human behavior. Just because a subject wasn’t yet categorized as a modern academic discipline (mostly by the West) does not mean the world before it was in the dark. Ever since the formation of society and humanity's innate desire for sustenance, economic motives have been at play. I may have been cynical since my youth, but questioning this timeline is how I challenged my teachers and discovered a whole new world beyond my school’s textbook materials.
Tracing the heritage of a concept is a humbling experience. It provides us with a holistic set of yardsticks to measure our literary and academic traditions. I believe true intellectual aesthetics lie in appreciating that the formation of an idea is never a one-man effort. You cannot fully grasp a general consensus without understanding the broader context of the world at the specific time that idea was evolving.
Take the concept of "profit." Today, we largely view profit through the framework established by Adam Smith’s 1776 The Wealth of Nations, which radically changed how the modern world views wealth creation. But Smith’s framework did not appear in a vacuum.
This evolutionary chain was perfectly illustrated at a COP28 debate hosted by the Global Ethical Finance Initiative, appropriately titled "Adam Smith and Ibn Khaldun: The Relationship Between Profit and Purpose."
During the debate, scholars highlighted how deeply Ibn Khaldun understood the societal impact of economics long before the Enlightenment. He challenged models that prioritized mere profit over human well-being. Instead of viewing the economy purely through the lens of capital and labor, Khaldun expanded the equation to include Asabiyyah (social solidarity) and Rizq (divine beneficence). Khaldun’s framework prioritized justice, harmony, and the ethical distribution of wealth over blind profit maximization, warning against the inequality that arises when wealth is accumulated without effort.
Fast forward 500 years, and Adam Smith shifted the paradigm, destigmatizing profit by showing how mutual exchange benefits society. However, the COP28 debate revealed just how misunderstood Smith is today. Modern capitalism often reduces him to the champion of the "invisible hand" and pure, cold self-interest.
Yet, a closer look at his Theory of Moral Sentiments shows he shared much of Khaldun’s thinking. Smith believed humans are inherently social, empathetic, and moral creatures. Empathy and social responsibility were central to his economic vision.
Tracing the concept of “profit” from the 14th-century Arab world to an 18th-century Scottish philosopher reveals a somewhat disappointing misrepresentation: what we largely witness institutionally today reveals what modern capitalism has "conveniently forgotten."