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 Hamid Dabashi's Iran: A People Interrupted
1st Edition
By Bryan Gibson
July 20, 2017
Hamid Dabashi’s 2007 Iran: A People Interrupted is simultaneously subtle, passionate, polarizing and polemical. A concise account of Iranian history from the early 19th-century onward, Dabashi’s book uses his incisive analytical skills as a basis for creating a persuasive argument against the views...
An Analysis of Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition
1st Edition
By Sahar Aurore Saeidnia, Anthony Lang
July 20, 2017
Hannah Arendt’s 1958 The Human Condition was an impassioned philosophical reconsideration of the goals of being human. In its arguments about the kind of lives we should lead and the political engagement we should strive for, Arendt’s interpretative skills come to the fore, in a brilliant display ...
An Analysis of Henry David Thoraeu's Civil Disobedience
1st Edition
By Mano Toth, Jason Xidias
July 20, 2017
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 ...
An Analysis of Ian Kershaw's The "Hitler Myth": Image and Reality in the Third Reich
1st Edition
By Helen Roche
July 20, 2017
Few historical problems are more baffling in retrospect than the conundrum of how Hitler was able to rise to power in Germany and then command the German people – many of whom had only marginal interest in or affiliation to Nazism – and the Nazi state. It took Ian Kershaw – author of the standard ...
An Analysis of Immanuel Kant's Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason
1st Edition
By Ian Jackson
July 20, 2017
The eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant is as daunting as he is influential: widely considered to be not only one of the most challenging thinkers of all time, but also one of the most important. His Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason takes on two of his central preoccupations –...
An Analysis of Jack A. Goldstone's Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World
1st Edition
By Etienne Stockland
July 20, 2017
Understanding why revolutions take place when they do, and as they do, is important in itself. Understanding how they are rooted in the societies they upend – and the ways in which those societies share crucial similarities – is arguably even more so. The enduring influence of Jack Goldstone's ...
An Analysis of Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities
1st Edition
By Martin Fuller, Ryan Moore
July 20, 2017
Despite having no formal training in urban planning, Jane Jacobs deftly explores the strengths and weaknesses of policy arguments put forward by American urban planners in the era after World War II. They believed that the efficient movement of cars was of more value in the development of US cities...
An Analysis of Joan Wallach Scott's Gender and the Politics of History
1st Edition
By Pilar Zazueta, Etienne Stockland
July 20, 2017
Joan Scott's work has influenced several generations of historians and helped make the topic of gender central to the way in which the discipline is taught and studied today. At root a new way of conceptualizing capitalist societies, Scott's theories suggest that gender is better understood as a ...
An Analysis of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice
1st Edition
By Filippo Dionigi, Jeremy Kleidosty
July 20, 2017
John Rawls's A Theory of Justice is one of the most influential works of legal and political theory published since the Second World War. It provides a memorably well-constructed and sustained argument in favour of a new (social contract) version of the meaning of social justice. In setting out ...
An Analysis of John Stuart Mills's Utilitarianism
1st Edition
By Tom Patrick, Sander Werkhoven
July 20, 2017
John Stuart Mill’s 1861 Utilitarianism remains one of the most widely known and influential works of moral philosophy ever written. It is also a model of critical thinking – one in which Mill’s reasoning and interpretation skills are used to create a well-structured, watertight, persuasive argument...
An Analysis of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble
1st Edition
By Tim Smith-Laing
July 20, 2017
Judith Butler's Gender Trouble is a perfect example of creative thinking. The book redefines feminism's struggle against patriarchy as part of a much broader issue: the damaging effects of all our assumptions about gender and identity. Looking at the factionalism of contemporary (1980s) feminism, ...
An Analysis of Kenneth Waltz's Theory of International Politics
1st Edition
By Riley Quinn, Bryan Gibson
July 20, 2017
Kenneth Waltz’s 1979 Theory of International Politics is credited with bringing about a “scientific revolution” in the study of international relations – bringing the field into a new era of systematic study. The book is also a lesson in reasoning carefully and critically. Good reasoning is ...