Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom (1944) analyzes the ways in which excessive government planning can erode democracy. The work draws influential parallels between the totalitarianism of both left
The bizarre story of Martin Guerre-a peasant who disappears from a small village in sixteenth-century France and whose place is taken by an imposter-has captivated historians for centuries.
Though written more than 500 years ago, Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince is still both widely read and very influential. Readers turn to it for its direct advice on the question of how to attain - and
Gordon W. Allport's 1954 book The Nature of Prejudice not only helped mold the ways in which psychologists investigate prejudice - it also shaped US society as a whole, making a substantial contributi
The 85 essays that maker up The Federalist Papers’ clearly demonstrate the vital importance of the art of persuasion. Written between 1787 and 1788 by three of the “Founding Fathers” of the United Sta
Marx’s Capital is without question one of the most influential books to be published in the course of the past two centuries. Controversial in its politics, and arriving at conclusions that are passio
What is the nature of our personal relationship with God? That's the core question of Fear and Trembling, published in 1843. If God asks us to do something we instinctively feel is unethical, must we
No philosopher could be a better example of creative thinking in action than Friedrich Nietzsche: a German iconoclast who systematically attacked the traditionally accepted views of academic philosoph
Butler's 1990 work shook the foundations of feminist theory and changed the conversation about gender. While many thinkers already accepted that "gender" was a category constructed by society defined
One of the most vital and controversial works in twentieth-century world moral philosophy, After Virtue (1981) examines how we think about, talk about, and act out our moral views in the modern world.
US psychologist Abraham Maslow’s A Theory of Human Motivation is a classic of psychological research that helped change the field for good. Like many field-changing thinkers, Maslow was not just a tal
John Maynard Keynes’s 1936 General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money is a perfect example of the global power of critical thinking. A radical reconsideration of some of the founding principles
Published in 1992, The End of History and the Last Man argues that capitalist democracy is the final destination for all societies. Fukuyama believed democracy triumphed during the Cold War because it
The end of the Cold War, which occurred early in the 1990s, brought joy and freedom to millions. But it posed a difficult question to the world's governments and to the academics who studied them: how
Edmund Burke’s 1791 Reflections on the Revolution in France is a strong example of how the thinking skills of analysis and reasoning can support even the most rhetorical of arguments. Often cited as t
Edward Said’s Orientalism is a masterclass in the art of interpretation wedded to close analysis. Interpretation is characterized by close attention to the meanings of terms, by clarifying, questionin
Aristotle, a student of Plato, wrote Nicomachean Ethics in 350 BCE, in a time of extraordinary intellectual development. Over two millennia later, his thorough exploration of virtue, reason, and the u
Advertisements for soap. The image of a film star. We accept these common objects as a normal part of our life. But each also carries hidden messages that none of us even suspect - as Barthes demonstr
Liquidated uses ethnographic research, traditionally used to study distant societies, to dissect the culture of high finance on New York's famous Wall Street.
With the ending of World War II in 1945, the Soviet Union and the United States began the decades-long confrontation known as the Cold War. American foreign policy focused on 'containment'-preventing
Few historians can claim to have undertaken historical analysis on as grand a scale as Geoffrey Parker in his 2013 work Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century. I
Gaia: A New Look At Life on Earth may continue to divide opinion, but nobody can deny that the book offers a powerful insight into the creative thinking of its author, James E. Lovelock.Published in 1
Sheila Fitzpatrick's Everyday Stalinism rejects the simplistic treatment of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian government that tightly controlled its citizens.
In this 1920 collection of early critical essays, Eliot proposes rules for how a poet should relate to a poem and to the poetic tradition. Arguing against the Romantic tradition of self-expression, El
Why We Can't Wait (1964) is arguably the most vital book by one of the most important men in US history. Martin Luther King Jr. sets out the ideas that fuelled a large part of the 1960s civil rights m
John Lewis Gaddis had written four previous books on the Cold War by the time he published We Now Know – so the main thrust of his new work was not so much to present new arguments as to re-examine ol
What is the ultimate goal of any human society? There have been many answers to this question. But by producing a series of notably well-structured arguments, economist Mahbub ul Haq’s Reflections on
The story of the crusades has been told and retold in Western histories-but invariable from Western perspectives. Carole Hillenbrand's fresh interpretation drew on Islamic sources that describe the cr
Riley-Smith's 1986 book gives convincing case for a 'revisionist' view of the crusades, challenging the common belief that the crusades were motivated by fanaticism and were designed to plunder the Ho
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
Franz Boas’s 1940 Race, Language and Culture is a monumentally important text in the history of its discipline, collecting the articles and essays that helped make Boas known as the ‘father of America
Most likely written between 170 and 180, Meditations is a remarkable work, a unique insight into one of the most conscientious and able Roman emperors, Marcus Aurelius, who ruled at the apex of the em
Hamid Dabashi suggests that the Iranian Revolution of 1978-9 would not have taken place had it not been for the influential ideas set out by eight Iranian Islamic thinkers in the decades before it occ
Daniel Goldhagen's study of the Holocaust offers conclusions that run directly counter to those reached by Christopher Browning, whose book Ordinary Men is also the subject of a Macat analysis. As suc
Albert Bandura is the most cited living psychologist, and is regularly named as one of the most influential figures ever to have worked in his field. Much of his reputation stems from the theories and
Based on 20 months of fieldwork among the Azande people of South Sudan, Evans-Pritchard's work became the founding text in the anthropology of witchcraft. Although the book had little impact when it f
Frantz Fanon's 1961 masterpiece is both a powerful analysis of the psychological effects of colonization and a rallying cry for violent uprising and independence.
Saba Mahmood’s 2005 Politics of Piety is an excellent example of evaluation in action.Mahmood’s book is a study of women’s participation in the Islamic revival across the Middle East. Mahmood – a femi
What makes good people capable of committing bad – even evil – acts? Few psychologists are as well-qualified to answer that question as Philip Zimbardo, a psychology professor who was not only the aut
