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Famous as an accomplished poet, T. S. Eliot was also the author of some highly important literary criticism. First published in 1920, The Sacred Wood collects 13 of Eliot's early critical essays. He intended them to be a statement of his principles for literary achievement. These concepts-and the works that Eliot wrote after setting out his principles-inspired many major poets of the twentieth century. Some wanted to imitate him, while many others...
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Europeans once thought all swans were white. "White" was part of how they defined "swan." Then black swans were discovered, and the definition changed forever.
In his 2007 book The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb says the Black Swans of his title can appear at any time, in the form of financial crises, wars, and other unexpected events that have profound, irreversible consequences. Taleb draws on philosophy, mathematics, economics, and other disciplines...
3) A Macat Analysis of Gustavo Gutiérrez's A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation
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Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez's 1971 book A Theology of Liberation provides an inspiring and groundbreaking argument as to how Christians and the Roman Catholic Church should act in support of the poor.
The Catholic Church had traditionally seen itself as politically neutral. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, reformers such as Gutiérrez urged it to seriously address real-world issues such as poverty and oppression. He coined the term "liberation...
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Thucydides' The History of the Peloponnesian War is generally acknowledged as the first great work in the fields of both history and political theory. It uses a combination of narrative, debate, and analysis to document the war between Athens and Sparta (431—404 b.c.). But the importance of the work lies less in the story, than in the way Thucydides tells it. History was the first major work of political inquiry that did not relate events to divine...
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Issues of human rights and freedoms always inflame passions, and John Rawls's A Theory of Justice will do the same.
Published in 1971, it links the idea of social justice to a basic sense of fairness that recognizes human rights and freedoms. Controversially, though, it also accepts differences in the distribution of goods and services-as long as they benefit the worst-off in society.
To justify his theory Rawls asks readers to indulge in a thought...
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Historian Frank Dikötter used a brief window of political openness before the 2008 Beijing Olympics in China to get inside official archives and gather evidence of the terrible toll the Great Chinese Famine took on ordinary people. He also discovered how Communist leaders caused, and then covered up, the catastrophe. Dikötter shows the disaster that engulfed China between 1958 and 1962 was much worse than previously thought, with a death toll of...
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More than 200 years after Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, governments around the world continue to address many of the issues discussed in the book. The most powerful states in the world are still committed to international trade, but questions are repeatedly asked about the role of governments in the economy and the effectiveness of the free market.
Smith wanted to show that mercantilism-the dominant economic theory of his time-was wrong....
8) A Macat Analysis of Marcel Mauss's The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies
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In The Gift (1925), Marcel Mauss elevates a simple gift from the status of innocent object to something that has the capacity to motivate people and define social relationships. The Gift analyzes cultures across the world and across time, examining the ways gifts are given and received to understand the rules and traditions of many different societies. Gifts can be tangible, like jewelry, or intangible, like the offering of skills. But binding relationships...
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First published in 1973, Albert Bandura's Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis is a groundbreaking work that helped lay the foundations of the discipline of social psychology. Much of what we now know about the influences of the early childhood environment on delinquency and anti-social behavior can be traced back to Bandura's work. In the book, he uses the subject of aggression to demonstrate and explore the usefulness of what is called social...
10) A Macat Analysis of Ha-Joon Chang's Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical P
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Since the nineteenth century people have claimed that the prosperity enjoyed by the First World was the result of its devotion to unconstrained economic freedoms. In his 2003 book Kicking Away the Ladder, South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang claims this was not the case and that, in fact, First World economic success was due to exactly the kinds of state intervention that traditional economic thinking consistently opposes today.
Chang's detailed...
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First published in Germany in 1980, British historian Ian Kershaw's The "Hitler Myth" is recognized as one of the most important books ever written about Adolf Hitler and the Nazi State. Kershaw wanted to focus on what he called the "history of everyday life," and so investigated the attitude of the German public to Hitler at the time, rather than looking at the dictator from the perspective of those in positions of power. He was intrigued to find...
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What is history? In his 2001 book In Defence of History British historian Richard J. Evans debates the very nature of the subject.
Certain thinkers known as postmodernists consider history to be not very far removed from a work of fiction, something based on a scholar's own interpretation of the past. Evans, however, argues that historians do not have free rein. Rather they are constrained and enabled by the nature of the surviving evidence.
Evans...
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English scientist James E. Lovelock wrote Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth for the general public, not for scientists. Scientists read it anyway, and rejected it, likely in part for its unapologetic use of mythological imagery.
But there is a lot of science in this 1979 work. Lovelock says the Earth (Gaia) is a superorganism, made up of all living things, interacting with the air, the oceans, and the surface rocks of the planet. He suggests Gaia...
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Publisher's Weekly called John Kotter's 1996 book Leading Change "a truly accessible, clear and visionary guide" to corporate transformation.
A professor at Harvard Business School, Kotter spent years coaching organizations-large and small; successful, less successful, and nearly bankrupt-through their own change processes. Some worked; others didn't. Distilling wisdom from these experiences, Kotter identifies eight common mistakes managers make...
15) A Macat Analysis of Amos Tversky, and Daniel Kahneman's Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics an
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Published in 1974 in the journal Science, the article "Judgment under Uncertainty" had a profound impact across the social sciences. Two relatively young Israeli psychologists were challenging the leading ideas about human thought. For decades, social scientists had used a mythical figure to describe how humans make decisions: homo economicus. Homo economicus was logical and conscientious. To make a decision, he would evaluate all the options open...
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Born in 1858, Franz Boas permanently changed the standards and practices of anthropology. A German-born secular Jew, he became known for his distinctive approach to the discipline-non-hierarchical, open to diverse inputs, and unbiased.
Throughout his career, Boas used his scholarship to effect social change. His work convinced his colleagues to abandon the theories that had decided one race (Caucasian) and one culture (Western European) were more...
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One of the most influential works of political theory ever written, The Federalist Papers collects 85 essays from 1787 and 1788, when the United States was a new country looking to find its way politically. Thomas Jefferson, author of the country's Declaration of Independence and a future US president himself, called the work "the best commentary on the principles of government which ever was written."
The Federalist Papers looked to persuade Americans...
18) A Macat Analysis of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color
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The United States has the world's largest prison population, with more than two million behind bars. Civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander says this is mainly due to the American government's "war on drugs," launched in 1982 under President Ronald Reagan. In 2010's The New Jim Crow, Alexander explains how this government initiative led to America's black citizens being imprisoned on a colossal scale. She compares this mass detention-with black men...
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In The Age of Revolution, renowned British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm focuses on the historical period from the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth. He concludes that the "dual revolutions" of the time-the French Revolution and the British Industrial Revolution-changed the way the whole world thought about politics and power, and fundamentally shaped the modern era.
This is the first in Hobsbawm's acclaimed trilogy...
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Although it is nearly 1500 years old, The Rule of St. Benedict remains one of the most influential texts in the Western monastic movement. It offers a unique insight into the early development of Christian monasticism as monks secluded themselves from the world to fulfil religious vows. For believers, it continues to offer guidance about incorporating meditation and prayer into devotions, the quiet times of reflection when the focus is on God, through...