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
Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ is a key postmodern text and is widely taught in many disciplines as one of the first texts to embrace technology from a leftist and feminist perspective using the metapho
Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ is a key postmodern text and is widely taught in many disciplines as one of the first texts to embrace technology from a leftist and feminist perspective using the metapho
The modern world has been marked by social revolutions that have transformed the states where they occurred. Theda Skocpol examines three of these uprisings-the French, Russian, and Chinese revolution
Milton Friedman was one of the most influential economists of all time – and his ideas had a huge impact on the economic policies of governments across the world.A key theorist of capitalism and its r
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
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
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
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
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.
The Second Sex caused uproar when it appeared in 1949. Simone de Beauvoir sets out groundbreaking ideas on what it meant to be a woman, charting the oppression of "the second sex." She argued that gen
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
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
