Books in the The Macat Library series

Ernest Gellner - a Jew who escaped from Czechoslovakia in 1939 after Hitler invaded - knew first-hand the catastrophic effects of excessive nationalism, and he was determined to understand the phenomenon that had shaped so much of 20th century history.

In the century before the Black Death swept across the world, economic relations flourished between Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, interacting on essentially equal terms.

Sigmund Freud, "the father of psychoanalysis," was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1856. He studied medicine at the University of Vienna before opening a private practice in his hometown. His work with physician Josef Breuer on treating nervous disorders led to a book, Studies on Hysteria.

Capitalism, thought Karl Marx, works by exploiting the working class. Their wages do not reflect the value of their labor. Marx concluded that capitalism would fail because of this contradiction at the heart of the capitalist system. He wrote Capital to give activists the theories and language they needed to criticise the system.

Ways of Seeing is a key art-historical work that continues to provoke widespread debate. It is comprised of seven different essays, three of which are pictorial and the other containing texts and images. Berger first examines the relationship between seeing and knowing, discussing how our assumptions affect how we see a painting.

Edited and produced from the lecture notes of his students at the University of Geneva, the Course in General Linguistics was first published in 1916, three years after its author's death. The book sets out Saussure's theory that all languages share the same underlying structure, regardless of historical or cultural context.