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 Philip II.
The Republic is Plato's most complete and incisive work - a detailed study of the problem of how best to ensure that justice exists in a real society, rather than as merely the product of an idealized philosophical construct.
The German sociologist Max Weber is considered to be one of the founding fathers of sociology, and ranks among the most influential writers of the 20th-century.
How was it possible for opponents of slavery to be so vocal in opposing the practice, when they were so accepting of the economic exploitation of workers in western factories - many of which were owned by prominent abolitionists?
Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks is a remarkable work, not only because it was written in jail as the Italian Marxist thinker fell victim to political oppression in his home country, but also because it shows his impressive analytical ability.
In The Night Battles, Carlo Ginzburg does more than introduce his readers to a novel group of supposed witches - the Benandanti, from the northern Italian province of Friulia.
Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is an unflinching dissection of the racial biases built into the American prison system.
With his 1954 book The Nature of Prejudice, American psychologist Gordon Allport displays the crucial skill of reasoning, producing and organizing an argument that was persuasive enough to have a major impact not only in universities, but also on government policy.
In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, neurologist Oliver Sacks looked at the cutting-edge work taking place in his field, and decided that much of it was not fit for purpose.
David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd: A Study in the Changing American Character is one of the best-known books in the history of sociology - holding a mirror up to contemporary America and showing the nation its own character as it had never seen it before.
Few historians trace grand themes across many centuries and places, but Ernst Kantorowicz's great work on the symbolic powers of kingship is a fine example of what can happen when they do.
Clifford Geertz has been called 'the most original anthropologist of his generation' - and this reputation rests largely on the huge contributions to the methodology and approaches of anthropological interpretation that he outlined in The Interpretation of Cultures.
Historians of the American Revolution had always seen the struggle for independence either as a conflict sparked by heavyweight ideology, or as a war between opposing social groups acting out of self-interest.
Few works can claim to form the foundation stones of one entire academic discipline, let alone two, but Thucydides's celebrated History of the Peloponnesian War is not only one of the first great works of history, but also the departure point from which the modern discipline of international relations has been built.
For those who lived through the Cold War period, and for many of the historians who study it, it seemed self-evident that the critical incidents that determined its course took place in the northern hemisphere, specifically in the face-off between NATO and the Warsaw Pact in Europe.
Marcel Mauss's 1925 essay The Gift is an enduring classic of sociological and anthropological analysis by a thinker who is one of the founding fathers of modern anthropology.
Perhaps no work of history written in the 20th century has done more to undermine an existing consensus and cause its readers to re-evaluate their own preconceptions than has Jonathan Riley-Smith's revisionist account of the motives of the first crusaders.
Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique is possibly the best-selling of all the titles analysed in the Macat library, and arguably one of the most important.
David Hume's 1748 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is a modern philosophical classic that helped reshape epistemology - the philosophy of knowledge.
Francis Fukuyama's controversial 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man demonstrates an important aspect of creative thinking: the ability to generate hypotheses and create novel explanations for evidence.
Despite having no formal training in urban planning, Jane Jacobs deftly explores the strengths and weaknesses of policy arguments put forward by American urban planners in the era after World War II.
Gilbert Ryle's 1949 The Concept of Mind is now famous above all as the origin of the phrase "e;the ghost in the machine"e; - a phrase Ryle used to attack the popular idea that our bodies and minds are separate.
Georges Lefebvre was one of the most highly-regarded historians of the 20th century - and a key reason for the high reputation he enjoys can be found in The Coming of the French Revolution.
One criticism of history is that historians all too often study it in isolation, failing to take advantage of models and evidence from scholars in other disciplines.
Reasoning is the critical thinking skill concerned with the production of arguments: making them coherent, consistent, and well-supported; and responding to opposing positions where necessary.
Herrnstein & Murray's The Bell Curve is a deeply controversial text that raises serious issues about the stakes involved in reasoning and interpretation.
The Age of Revolution is the first of four works by Eric Hobsbawm that collectively synthesize the ideas he developed over a lifetime spent studying the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Few historical problems are more baffling in retrospect than the conundrum of how Hitler was able to rise to power in Germany and then command the German people - many of whom had only marginal interest in or affiliation to Nazism - and the Nazi state.
