Paul Kennedy owes a great deal to the editor who persuaded him to add a final chapter to this study of the factors that contributed to the rise and fall of European powers since the age of Spain's Phi
Aristotle remains one of the most celebrated thinkers of all time in large part thanks to his incisive critical thinking skills. In Politics, which can be considered one of the foundational books of t
Hans Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations is a classic of political science, built on the firm foundation of Morgenthau’s watertight reasoning skills.The central aim of reasoning is to construct a logi
Benedict Anderson’s 1983 masterpiece Imagined Communities is a ground-breaking analysis of the origins and meanings of “nations” and “nationalism”.A book that helped reshape the field of nationalism s
Written by the great medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed attempts to explain the perplexities of biblical language—and apparent inconsistencies in the text—in the light
The Dutch anthropologist Geert Hofstede is recognized as a pioneer in the fields of international management and social psychology – and his work is a perfect example of the ways in which interpretati
Social anthropologist Jean Lave and computer scientist Etienne Wenger’s seminal Situated Learning helped change the fields of cognitive science and pedagogy by approaching learning from a novel angle.
How do you solve a problem like understanding Iraq? For Hanna Batatu, the solution to this conundrum lay in generating alternative possibilities that effectively side-stepped the conventional wisdom o
Febvre asked this core question in The Problem of Unbelief: “Could sixteenth-century people hold religious views that were not those of official, Church-sanctioned Christianity, or could they simply n
Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics is a dense masterpiece of sustained argumentative reasoning. It earned its place as one of the most important and influential books in Western philosophy by virtue of its uncom
In Outline of a Theory of Practice, Bourdieu questions the preeminent ideas of social anthropologists such as Levi-Strauss who stressed the structural principles governing human action rather than the
Ways of Seeing is a key art-historical work that continues to provoke widespread debate. It is comprised of seven different essays, three of which are pictorial and the other containing texts and imag
Vision and Difference, published in 1988, is one of the most significant works in feminist visual culture arguing that feminist art history of is a political as well as academic endeavour. Pollo
Susan Sontag’s 1997 text, On Photography, brought photographic theory into the university classroom with its staunch defence of the medium as art and inspired a new wave of Marxist Criticism in the fi
Tabbaa’s Transformation offers an innovative approach to understanding the profound changes undergone by Islamic art and architecture during the often neglected Medieval Islamic period. Examinin
Argyris’s Integrating The Individual and the Organization is part of a series of essays and books considering how organisations should be run. This essay explores the lack of congruence between the ne
Exploration and Exploitation is a key text for scholars and business practitioners interested in promoting economic well-being and sustainable growth. March’s work promotes the preservation of compani
Ikujiro Nonaka’s A Dynamic Theory of Organisational Knowledge Creation outlines the creation of organisational knowledge through the constant conversion of the two types of knowledge, tacit and explic
Amartya Sen’s Inequality Re-examined is a seminal text setting out a theory to evaluate social arrangements and inequality. By asking the question, ‘equality of what’?, Sen shows that (in)equality sho
Ludwig Von Mises’s 1912 contribution to the theory of monetary policy and the current prevailing consensus in modern economic liberalism, The Theory of Money and Credit, was a milestone achievement. T
