Books in the The Macat Library series

Maslow's 1943 essay established his idea of humanistic psychology as a "third force" in the field. While psychoanalysts sought to understand behaviour by uncovering subconscious desires and behaviourists through analysis of conditioned behaviours.

Few works of scholarship have so comprehensively recast an existing debate as Chinua Achebe's essay on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

"Black Skin, White Masks offers a radical analysis of the psychological effects of colonization on the colonized. Fanon witnessed the effects of colonization first hand both in his birthplace, Martinique, and again later in life when he worked as a psychiatrist in another French colony, Algeria.

Carson's 1962 work Silent Spring was one of the first books ever to highlight environmentalist issues. Focusing on the negative, widespread, and long-lasting effects of human activity on the environment-particularly through the use of chemical pesticides in agriculture-Carson argued that we are all morally obliged to look after the environment.

Lewis's 1952 Mere Christianity-originally printed in pamphlet form during World War II-documents a complex journey from atheism to faith. Lewis's fresh, lively, and often humorous presentation of Christian doctrine helped to make him arguably the greatest defender of Christianity of the 20th century.

Philip Zimbardo is fascinated by why people can behave in awful ways. uSome psychologists believe those who commit cruelty are innately evil. Zimbardo disagrees.

Published in 1994, The Bell Curve caused uproar. Herrnstein and Murray claim that intelligence is the key factor in determining success in life and that it is genetic and, more controversially still, that some ethnic groups are more intelligent than others.

Dikotter's 2010 masterpiece catalogues the tragedy and the cover-up of the hideous famine caused by the Great Leap Forward-Mao Zedong's disastrous attempt to jumpstart industrialization in China in the late 1950s.

Few social historians had examined the popular religious beliefs of the 1500s at the time Thomas published Religion and the Decline of Magic in 1971. His analysis of how deeply held beliefs in witchcraft, spirits, and magic evolved during the Reformation remains one of the great works of post-war scholarship.

In his best selling book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, economist Thomas Piketty argues that capitalism has no tendency towards a fair distribution of wealth taking issue with the idea that inequality declines as capitalism matures.

In Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein presents a radical approach to the philosophy of language and the mind, setting out a startlingly fresh conception of philosophy itself. Wittgenstein begins from the insight that most philosophical problems trace back to incorrect assumptions about the nature of language.

The Selfish Gene is that rarest of things: an outstanding work of scholarship that has seeped into popular culture. Richard Dawkins's contentious notion that organisms are survival mechanisms for 'selfish genes' has helped shape the debate in evolutionary biology for almost 40 years.

Theory of International Politics created a "scientific revolution" in international relations, starting two major debates. It defined the 1980s controversy between the 'neorealists,' who believed that competition between states was inevitable, and the 'neoliberals,' who believed that states could co-operate.

In this original and controversial 2005 book, Mahmood argues that Muslim women can show independence even while assuming traditional Islamic roles. Her research suggests that, in choosing to embrace the norms of their faith, these pious Muslims are not limiting, but rather affirming, themselves.

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.

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 and right, questioning the central government control exerted by Western democracies.

How does a state control its citizens? Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish answers this question by investigating the prison system. Foucault argues that prison created and merged into a wider system of surveillance that extends throughout society.

An important Marxist work, Prison Notebooks (1948) argues that we must understand societies both in terms of their economic relationships and their cultural beliefs.

Morgenthau's classic text, published in 1948, not only introduced the concept of political realism, but also established it as the dominant approach in international relations and the guiding philosophy of US foreign policy during the Cold War. Politics Among Nations begins with a discussion of the principles that guide political realism.

As recently as the 1920s, the lack of great female writers was often considered evidence of women's inferiority. Virginia Woolf disagreed. Her 1929 essay argues that creativity is impossible without privacy and freedom from financial worries, and throughout history, women have had neither therefore, no tradition of great female writing existed.

Before Browning's 1992 book, most Holocaust scholarship focused either on the experience of the victims or on the Nazi political ideology driving the slaughter. Browning investigates something else: the men who carried out acts of extreme violence. Who were they? How could they end up committing such unspeakable acts?

Like Foucault's earlier works, The History of Sexuality (1976) is ground-breaking and controversial. His claim that sexuality is more a social concept than the product of biological instincts challenges the accepted idea that it was the rise of modernity and capitalism that resulted in repression of sexualities.

Roll Jordan Roll (1974) is a study of the relationship between master and slave in the United States in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Genovese looks beyond the idea of paternalism-where owners limited slaves' freedoms for their own good-suggesting the relationship was more complex.