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 Leon Festinger's A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance
1st Edition
By Camille Morvan, Alexander O’Connor
July 20, 2017
Leon Festinger’s 1957 A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance is a key text in the history of psychology – one that made its author one of the most influential social psychologists of his time. It is also a prime example of how creative thinking and problem solving skills can come together to produce work...
An Analysis of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations
1st Edition
By Michael O' Sullivan
July 20, 2017
Many still consider Ludwig Wittgenstein’s 1953 Philosophical Investigations to be one of the breakthrough works of twentieth-century philosophy. The book sets out a radically new conception of philosophy itself, and demonstrates all the attributes of a fine analytical mind. Taking an argument from...
An Analysis of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations
1st Edition
By James Orr
July 20, 2017
Despite being written between 170 and 180, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations often resonates with modern readers because of its remarkable resemblance to a self-help book. Written as a series of personal notes in the last decade of his reign as Roman emperor, the meditations were never intended for ...
An Analysis of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Why We Can't Wait
1st Edition
By Jason Xidias
July 20, 2017
Martin Luther King’s policy of non-violent protest in the struggle for civil rights in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century led to fundamental shifts in American government policy relating to segregation, and a cultural shift in the treatment of African Americans. King’...
An Analysis of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
1st Edition
By Sebastian Guzman, James Hill
July 20, 2017
The German sociologist Max Weber is considered to be one of the founding fathers of sociology, and ranks among the most influential writers of the 20th-century. His most famous book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, is a masterpiece of sociological analysis whose power is based on...
An Analysis of Michael E. Porter's Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors
1st Edition
By Pádraig Belton
July 20, 2017
Michael E. Porter’s 1980 book Competitive Strategy is a fine example of critical thinking skills in action. Porter used his strong evaluative skills to overturn much of the accepted wisdom in the world of business. By exploring the strengths and weaknesses of the accepted argument that the best ...
An Analysis of Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish
1st Edition
By Meghan Kallman, Rachele Dini
July 20, 2017
Michel Foucault is famous as one of the 20th-century’s most innovative thinkers – and his work on Discipline and Punish was so original and offered models so useful to other scholars that the book now ranks among the most influential academic works ever published. Foucault’s aim is to trace the way...
An Analysis of Natalie Zemon Davis's The Return of Martin Guerre
1st Edition
By Joseph Tendler
July 20, 2017
Few stories are more captivating than the one told by Natalie Zemon Davis in The Return of Martin Guerre. Basing her research on records of a bizarre court case that occurred in 16th-century France, she uses the tale of a missing soldier – whose disappearance threatens the livelihood of his peasant...
An Analysis of Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince
1st Edition
By Riley Quinn, Ben Worthy
July 20, 2017
How should rulers rule? What is the nature of power? These questions had already been asked when Niccolò Machiavelli wrote The Prince in 1513. But what made his thinking on the topic different was his ability to interpret evidence: to look at old issues and find new meaning within them. Many of ...
An Analysis of Plato's Symposium
1st Edition
By Richard Ellis, Simon Ravenscroft
July 20, 2017
Plato’s Symposium, composed in the early fourth century BC, demonstrates how powerful the skills of reasoning and evaluation can be. Known to philosophers for its seminal discussion of the relationship of love to knowledge, it is also a classic text for demonstrating the two critical thinking ...
An Analysis of Richard J. Evans's In Defence of History
1st Edition
By Nicholas Piercey, Tom Stammers
July 20, 2017
Richard Evans wrote In Defence of History at a time when the historian's profession was coming under heavy attack as a result of the ‘cultural turn’ taken by the discipline during the late 1980s and the 1990s. Historians were being forced to face up to postmodern thinking, which argued that, ...
An Analysis of Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life
1st Edition
By Christine Ma, Michael Schapira
July 20, 2017
Herrnstein & Murray's The Bell Curve is a deeply controversial text that raises serious issues about the stakes involved in reasoning and interpretation. The authors’ central contention is that intelligence is the primary factor determining social outcomes for individuals – and that it is a ...