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 Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America
1st Edition
By Elizabeth Morrow
July 20, 2017
Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1838 Democracy in America is a classic of political theory – and of the problem-solving skills central to putting forward political ideas. Problem-solving has several aspects: identifying problems, finding methodologies to deal with them, and applying the right criteria to ...
An Analysis of Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks
1st Edition
By Lorenzo Fusaro, Jason Xidias
July 20, 2017
Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks is a remarkable work, not only because it was written in jail as the Italian Marxist thinker fell victim to political oppression in his home country, but also because it shows his impressive analytical ability. First published in 1948, 11 years after Gramsci’s ...
An Analysis of C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man
1st Edition
By Ruth Jackson, Brittany Pheiffer Noble
July 20, 2017
C.S. Lewis’s 1943 The Abolition of Man is a set of three essays that encapsulate some of the most important elements of good critical thinking. Lewis considers a weighty topic, moral philosophy – and more precisely how we teach it, and where morality comes from. As critics and enthusiasts for Lewis...
An Analysis of Carlo Ginzburg's The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
1st Edition
By Etienne Stockland, Luke Freeman
July 20, 2017
In The Night Battles, Carlo Ginzburg does more than introduce his readers to a novel group of supposed witches – the Benandanti, from the northern Italian province of Friulia. He also invents and deploys new and creative ways of tackling his source material that allow him to move beyond their ...
An Analysis of Carole Hillenbrand's The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives
1st Edition
By Robert Houghton, Damien Peters
July 20, 2017
For many centuries, the history of the crusades, as written by Western historians, was based solidly on Western sources. Evidence from the Islamic societies that the crusaders attacked was used only sparingly – in part because it was hard for most westerners to read, and in part because much of it ...
An Analysis of Chinua Achebe's An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness
1st Edition
By Clare Clarke
July 20, 2017
Few works of scholarship have so comprehensively recast an existing debate as Chinua Achebe’s essay on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Achebe – a highly distinguished Nigerian novelist and university teacher – looked with fresh eyes at a novel that was set in Africa, but in which Africans appear...
An Analysis of Claude Levi-Strauss's Structural Anthropology
1st Edition
By Jeffrey A. Becker, Kitty Wheater
July 20, 2017
Claude Lévi-Strauss is probably the most complex anthropological theorist of all time. His work continues to influence present-day thinkers in his field, but he is perhaps even more influential beyond it. As one of the key figures in the development of what is known today as ‘French theory,’ ...
An Analysis of Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays
1st Edition
By Abena Dadze-Arthur
July 20, 2017
Clifford Geertz has been called ‘the most original anthropologist of his generation’ – and this reputation rests largely on the huge contributions to the methodology and approaches of anthropological interpretation that he outlined in The Interpretation of Cultures. The centrality of ...
An Analysis of David C. Kang's China Rising: Peace, Power and Order in East Asia
1st Edition
By Matteo Dian, Jason Xidias
July 20, 2017
A critical analysis of David C. Kang’s China Rising, which is a fine example of an author making use of creative thinking skills to reach a conclusion that flies in the face of traditional thinking. The conventional view that the book opposed, known in international relations as ‘realism,’ was that...
An Analysis of David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years
1st Edition
By Sulaiman Hakemy
July 20, 2017
Debt is one of the great subjects of our day, and understanding the way that it not only fuels economic growth, but can also be used as a means of generating profit and exerting control, is central to grasping the way in which our society really works. David Graeber's contribution to this debate ...
An Analysis of David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
1st Edition
By Michael O'Sullivan
July 20, 2017
David Hume’s 1748 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is a modern philosophical classic that helped reshape epistemology – the philosophy of knowledge. It is also a classic of the critical thinking skills of analysis and reasoning. Analysis is all about understanding how arguments work and fit ...
An Analysis of David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
1st Edition
By John Donaldson, Ian Jackson
July 20, 2017
David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is a philosophical classic that displays a powerful mastery of the critical thinking skills of reasoning and evaluation. Hume’s subject, the question of the existence and possible nature of God, was, and still is, a persistent topic of ...