The Macat Library: Great Works for Critical Thinking
About the Book Series
Making the ideas of the world’s great thinkers accessible, affordable, and comprehensible to everybody, everywhere.
With a growing list of over 180 titles across a broad range of subject areas, Macat works with leading academics from the world’s top universities to produce new analyses that focus on the ideas and the impact of the most influential works ever written. By setting them in context – and looking at the influences that shaped their authors, as well as the responses they provoked – Macat encourages readers to look at these classics and game-changers with fresh eyes.
An Analysis of Robert A. Dahl's Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City
1st Edition
By Astrid Noren Nilsson, Jason Xidias
August 08, 2017
American political theorist Robert Dahl’s 1961 work of political theory exhibits deep levels of creative thinking. When Dahl wrote, the American system of liberal democracy was generally considered to be shaped by a small group of powerful individuals who dominate because they are wealthy and ...
An Analysis of Robert D. Putnam's Bowling Alone
1st Edition
By Elizabeth Morrow, Lindsay Scorgie-Porter
August 08, 2017
American political scientist Robert Putnam wasn’t the first person to recognize that social capital – the relationships between people that allow communities to function well – is the grease that oils the wheels of society. But by publishing Bowling Alone, he moved the debate from one primarily ...
An Analysis of Soren Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death
1st Edition
By Shirin Shafaie
August 08, 2017
Søren Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death is widely recognized as one of the most significant and influential works of Christian philosophy written in the nineteenth century. One of the cornerstones of Kierkegaard’s reputation as a writer and thinker, the book is also a masterclass in the art of ...
An Analysis of Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View
1st Edition
By Mark Gridley, William J. Jenkins
August 08, 2017
Stanley Milgram is one of the most influential and widely-cited social psychologists of the twentieth century. Recognized as perhaps the most creative figure in his field, he is famous for crafting social-psychological experiments with an almost artistic sense of creative imagination – casting new ...
An Analysis of T.S. Eliot's The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism
1st Edition
By Rachel Teubner
August 08, 2017
The essay for which The Sacred Wood is primarily remembered is one of the most famous pieces of criticism in English: “Tradition and the Individual Talent” helped to re-orientate arguments about the study of literature and its production by redefining the nature of tradition and the artist's ...
An Analysis of Theodore Levitt's Marketing Myopia
1st Edition
By Monique Diderich, Elizabeth Mamali
August 08, 2017
Theodore Levitt’s 1960 article “Marketing Myopia” is a business classic that earned its author the nickname “the father of modern marketing”. It is also a beautiful demonstration of the problem solving skills that are crucial in so many areas of life – in business and beyond. The problem facing ...
An Analysis of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century
1st Edition
By Nick Broten
August 08, 2017
Thomas Piketty is a fine example of an evaluative thinker. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, he not only provides detailed and sustained explanations of why he sees existing arguments relating to income and wealth distribution as flawed, but also gives us very detailed evaluations of the ...
An Analysis of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own
1st Edition
By Tim Smith-Laing, Fiona Robinson
August 08, 2017
A Room of One's Own is a very clear example of how creative thinkers connect and present things in novel ways. Based on the text of a talk given by Virginia Woolf at an all-female Cambridge college, Room considers the subject of 'women and fiction.' Woolf’s approach is to ask why, in the early ...
An Analysis of Jonathan Riley-Smith's The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading
1st Edition
By Damien Peters
July 25, 2017
Perhaps no work of history written in the 20th century has done more to undermine an existing consensus and cause its readers to re-evaluate their own preconceptions than has Jonathan Riley-Smith's revisionist account of the motives of the first crusaders. Riley-Smith's thesis – based on extensive...
An Analysis of Gustavo Gutiérrez's A Theology of Liberation
1st Edition
By Marthe Hesselmans, Jonathan Teubner
July 22, 2017
Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez wanted to solve the problem of how the church could conduct itself to improve the lives of the poor, while consistently positioning itself as politically neutral. Despite being a deeply religious man, Gutiérrez was extremely troubled by the lukewarm way in which ...
An Analysis of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations
1st Edition
By John Collins
July 20, 2017
Adam Smith’s 1776 Inquiry into The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations – more often known simply as The Wealth of Nations – is one of the most important books in modern intellectual history. Considered one of the fundamental works of classical economics, it is also a prime example of the ...
An Analysis of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue
1st Edition
By Jon W. Thompson
July 20, 2017
Alasdair MacIntyre’s 1981 After Virtue was a ground-breaking contribution to modern moral philosophy. Dissatisfied with the major trends in the moral philosophy of his time, MacIntyre argued that modern moral discourse had no real rational basis. Instead, he suggested, if one wanted to build a ...