section_path: Legacy/Modern historians
section_name: Modern historians
paragraph_text: Modern historians
  
  British historian Arnold J. Toynbee has called Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah "the greatest work of its kind." Ernest Gellner, once a professor of philosophy and logic at the London School of Economics, considered Khaldun's definition of government the best in the history of political theory.
  
  More moderate views on the scope of Ibn Khaldun's contributions have also emerged.
  
  Arthur Laffer, for whom the Laffer curve is named, acknowledged that Ibn Khaldun's ideas, as well as others, precede his own work on that curve.
  
  Economist Paul Krugman described Ibn Khaldun as "a 14th-century Islamic philosopher who basically invented what we would now call the social sciences".
  
  19th century Scottish theologian and philosopher Robert Flint praised him strongly, "as a theorist of history he had no equal in any age or country until Vico appeared, more than three hundred years later. Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine were not his peers, and all others were unworthy of being even mentioned along with him". Ibn Khaldun's work on evolution of societies also influenced Egon Orowan, who introduced the concept of socionomy. While Ibn Khaldun's record-keeping is usually passed over in favor of recognizing his contributions to the science of history, Abderrahmane Lakhsassi wrote "No historian of the Maghreb since and particularly of the Berbers can do without his historical contribution."