Series: The Macat Library

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 logical and persuasive argument that carefully organises and supports its conclusions – often around a central concept or scheme of argumentation. Morgenthau’s subject was international relations – the way in...

In his 1997 work Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond marshals evidence from five continents and across 13,000 years of human history in an attempt to answer the question of why that history unfolded so differently in various parts of the globe. His results offer new explanations for why the unequal divisions of power and wealth so familiar to us...

Robert O. Keohane’s After Hegemony is both a classic of international relations scholarship and an example of how creative thinking can help shed new light on the world. Since the end of World War II, the global political landscape had been dominated by two superpowers, the USA and the USSR, and the tense stand-off of the Cold War. But, as...

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 the western political tradition, the focus is on problem-solving, and particularly on the generation and evaluation of alternative possibilities. Aristotle’s aim in Politics is to determine how...

Of all the controversies facing historians today, few are more divisive or more important than the question of how the Holocaust was possible. What led thousands of Germans – many of them middle-aged reservists with, apparently, little Nazi zeal – to willingly commit acts of genocide? Was it ideology? Was there something rotten in the German soul? Or was it...

C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity is a perfect example of one of the most effective aspects of critical thinking skills: the use of reasoning to build a strong, logical argument. Lewis originally wrote the book as a series of radio talks given from 1942-1944, at the height of World War II. The talks were designed to lay out the most basic...

Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality is a sustained feat of incisive interpretation. Well known as one of Nietzsche’s greatest works, and as one of the most important books of nineteenth-century philosophy, On the Genealogy of Morality also provided the inspiration for the methodologies of several key philosophers of the modern age. Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, among others,...

On Religion is a major text for the development of modern religious thought in the West. Its author, German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, is remembered as the Father of Modern Protestant Theology, as well as for his contributions to philosophy, ethics, and hermeneutics. Comprising five lively speeches which defend religion as a universal element of human life, the text was addressed...

On Religion is a major text for the development of modern religious thought in the West, and its author, German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, is remembered as the Father of Modern Protestant Theology. He is also noted for his contributions to philosophy, ethics, and hermeneutics. Comprising five lively speeches, which defend religion as a universal element of human life, the text...

In Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau looks at old issues in new ways, asking: is there ever a time when individuals should actively oppose their government and its justice system? After a thorough review of the evidence, Thoreau comes to the conclusion that opposition is legitimate whenever government actions or institutions are unacceptable to an individual’s conscience. What is particularly...

Michel Foucault’s 1969 essay What is an Author? sidesteps the stormy arguments surrounding "intentional fallacy" and the "death of the author," offering an entirely different way of looking at texts. Foucault points out that all texts are written but not all are discussed as having "authors". So what is special about "authored" texts? And what makes an “author” different to...

Written by the great medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed attempts to explain the perplexities of biblical language—and apparent inconsistencies in the text—in the light of philosophy and scientific reason. Composed as a letter to a student, The Guide aims to harmonise Aristotelian principles with the Hebrew Bible and argues that God must be understood as both...

Wright’s The New Testament and the People of God is the first volume of his acclaimed series Christian Origins and the Question of God. It comprehensively addresses the historical and theological questions surrounding the origins of Christianity. The text outlines Wright's hermeneutical theory and discusses the history of the Jews, stressing the close connection with Judaism and developing this to...

The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 book, is a masterpiece of feminist criticism and philosophy. An incendiary take on the place of women in post-war French society, it helped define major trends in feminist thought for the rest of the 20th century, and its influence is still felt today. The book’s success owes much to Beauvoir’s brilliant writing style...

Our Common Future is a joint work produced in 1987 by a United Nations commission headed by former Norwegian Prime Minister, Gro Brundtland. Also known as The Brundtland Report, it offers a classic approach to problem solving by first asking a productive question. How do we protect the world we live in for future generations, while at the same time...

Few works can claim to form the foundation stones of one entire academic discipline, let alone two, but Thucydides's celebrated History of the Peloponnesian War is not only one of the first great works of history, but also the departure point from which the modern discipline of international relations has been built. This is the case largely because the author...

Few works can claim to form the foundation stones of one entire academic discipline, let alone two, but Thucydides's celebrated History of the Peloponnesian War is not only one of the first great works of history, but also the departure point from which the modern discipline of international relations has been built. This is the case largely because the author...

St. Augustine’s Confessions is one of the most important works in the history of literature and Christian thought. Written around 397, when Augustine was the Christian bishop of Hippo (in modern-day Algeria), Confessions were designed both to spiritually educate those who already shared Augustine’s faith, and to convert those who did not. Augustine did this through the original manoeuvre of...

Elizabeth Anscombe’s 1958 essay, Modern Moral Philosophy, is a cutting intervention in modern philosophy that showcases the full power of effective evaluative and analytical critical thinking skills. Though only 16 pages long, Anscombe's paper aimed to reform the entire field of modern moral philosophy—a task that could only be accomplished by carefully examining the existing arguments of the giants of...

Reconstruction in America is the name given to the period that, beginning shortly before the end of the American Civil War and running until 1877, saw the frustration of the federal government's attempts to integrate the newly freed slaves into the American political and economic system. It ended in frustration, disillusionment, and also violence, with individual southern states denying rights...

One criticism of history is that historians all too often study it in isolation, failing to take advantage of models and evidence from scholars in other disciplines. This is not a charge that can be laid at the door of Alfred Crosby. His book The Columbian Exchange not only incorporates the results of wide reading in the hard sciences, anthropology,...

Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is an unflinching dissection of the racial biases built into the American prison system. Named after the laws that enforced racial segregation in the southern United States until the mid-1960s, The New Jim Crow argues that while America is now legally a colorblind society—treating all races equally...