Politics is a part of our lives, whether or not we are politically active, and this is precisely why numerous thinkers have
written on the topic. This paper examines three of these
political thinkers: Aristotle, an Ancient Greek
philosopher; Ibn Khaldun, an Arab historian, philosopher, and sociologist; and Niccolo Machiavelli, an Italian political philosopher. The paper shows that, while these three thinkers come from different times and cultures, all recognized the importance of the relationship between the government and citizens, effectively stressed qualities of leadership as the key to the stability of that relationship, but offered very different interpretations of those qualities.