Books in the The Macat Library series

Ever 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. Chang claims that, in fact, First World success was due to exactly the kinds of state intervention that traditional economic thinking consistently opposes today.

For decades, social scientists had used a mythical figure to describe how humans make decisions: homo economicus. He was logical and conscientious. To make a decision, he would evaluate all the options open to him, then choose the most rational course of action.

Published in 2010, Bloodlands argues that accounts of World War II have paid too much attention to the atrocities of Adolf Hitler, and not enough to Joseph Stalin's. Snyder believes a definitive history of the period must depict the suffering of all of the conflict's victims.

Born in Britain in 1737, Thomas Paine had a humble, religious upbringing and very little formal education. The course of his life turned in 1774, when he met the great American statesman Benjamin Franklin in London.

"Vision and Difference, published in 1988, is one of the most significant works in feminist visual culture arguing that feminist art history of is a political as well as academic endeavour. Pollock expresses how images are key to the construction of sexual difference, both in visual culture and in broader societal experiences.

Tabbaa's Transformation offers an innovative approach to understanding the profound changes undergone by Islamic art and architecture during the often neglected Medieval Islamic period.

Hegel's most influential work introduces the idea that philosophical truths are inseparable from the history of philosophy and the histories and politics of the societies in which they arise.

Excited by the scientific breakthroughs of the day, David Hume set out to construct a science of the mind. 1748's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is the result. A work that had a huge influence on great thinkers, including Kant, An Enquiry is Hume's examination of how we obtain information and form beliefs.

The History of the Peloponnesian War is acknowledged as the first great work in the fields of history and political theory. It uses narrative, debate, and analysis to document the war between Athens and Sparta (431-404 BCE). But its importance lies less in the story than in the way Thucydides tells it.

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, Eliot proposes instead that poetry should express universal values and emotions.

MacLeod's 1987 work, ground-breaking for the way it combines field research with theory, follows the lives of two groups of young men from a low-income housing project in the Boston area to show how poor people who aspire to live the American Dream face many more obstacles than their middle-class counterparts.

Kantorowicz's 1957 study of 1,200 years of monarchy has had a profound affect on the way academics think about the study of history.

Why do we attempt to justify decisions that are clearly irrational? The answer lies in "cognitive dissonance," the feeling of mental discomfort we experience when we hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time.

An instant bestseller, Sacks's 1985 book argues that, by connecting with their patients and pay attention to their stories, doctors can provide significantly more effective care.

Rousseau's famous work sets out the radical concept of the 'social contract': a give-and-take relationship between individual freedom and social order. If people are free to do as they like, governed only by their own sense of justice, they are also vulnerable to chaos and violence.