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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...

In the 1960s, researchers into human memory began to understand memory as operating under two systems. The first was a short-term system handling information for mere seconds. The second was a long-term system capable of managing information...

This is a book for anyone who wants to understand exactly what we mean by ethics and morality today. One of the most vital and controversial works in the twentieth-century world of moral philosophy, Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue examines how we...

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...

Albert Hourani’s 1991 work, A History of the Arab Peoples, is unsurpassed as an overview of Arab history, from the rise of Islam to the late twentieth century. Going far beyond the political history that had generally characterized previous...

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...

Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840, challenged conventional thinking about democracy when it appeared—and is still cited by leading politicians today.Having witnessed some negative effects of...

Environmental factors shape our history just as much as—and sometimes more than—human factors. That’s the premise of Alfred W. Crosby’s 1972 work The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, a key text in environmental...

Economist Amartya Sen’s 1997 work Development as Freedom presents a “middle way” approach to how we should look at international development, based on the idea that its success or failure cannot be measured by income alone. Having grown up in India,...

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...

First published in 1948, Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks is an important Marxist work that says we must understand societies both in terms of their economic relationships and their cultural beliefs.Gramsci wanted to explore why Russia had undergone...

How many books can claim to be so influential as to inspire the development of a whole school of thought? The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle’s Metaphysics did exactly that, laying the foundations for a new branch of...

Aristotle wrote Nicomachean Ethics in Greece in the fourth century b.c.e., a period of extraordinary all-round intellectual development. He was a student of Plato, who in turn was a student of Socrates. Aristotle went on to teach the warrior and...

Politics is one of the first books ever to investigate the concept of political philosophy. Written by the famous Greek thinker Aristotle in the fourth century b.c.e., it focuses on trying to understand how best to create political communities that...

Published in 1996, Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large is an edited collection of earlier essays that had already made the Indian-born anthropologist an influential figure in his field of cultural anthropology. Appadurai here presents a theory of...

Originally written as 13 individual books around 397 c.e., Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions is one of the most referenced works in the Western literary tradition. Augustine lived from 354–430 c.e., and the work is in part an autobiography. But it also...

Some people think nationhood is as old as civilization itself. But for anthropologist, historian, and political scientist Benedict Anderson, nation and nationalism are products of the communication technology of the era known as the modern age, which...

Before Bernard Bailyn published The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution in 1967, it was generally believed that the Revolution was driven both by social conflict between colonial settlers and the ruling British government, and by...

Born in 1921, Betty Friedan was an American psychology graduate, political activist, journalist, wife, and mother, who challenged the vision 1950s America had of itself as a nation of happy housewives in contented families.In 1963’s The Feminine...

“The Core Competence of the Corporation” challenged and redefined traditional concepts of management strategy in a market that was growing increasingly global and competitive.Business scholars C. K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel base their 1990 argument for...

Published in 1938, Cyril Lionel Robert (C. L. R.) James’s The Black Jacobins is the little-known story of the only successful slave revolution known in history. It was this 12-year struggle of the African slaves in the French colony of San Domingo...

C. S. Lewis may be most famous for his fiction, including children’s books like the Chronicles of Narnia series. But in his 1952 book Mere Christianity—originally printed as three separate pamphlets in 1942, 1943, and 1944—this eclectic and learned...

Northern Irish academic, novelist, and broadcaster C. S. Lewis’s 1943 philosophical work The Abolition of Man is subtitled Reflections on Education With Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools. It is about the power...

When American sociologist C. Wright Mills’s The Sociological Imagination was first published in 1959, it provoked much hostile reaction. This was understandable: the book was a hard-hitting attack on how sociology was practiced—and on a number of...