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 James March's Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning
1st Edition
By Pádraig Belton
May 11, 2018
Exploration and Exploitation is a key text for scholars and business practitioners interested in promoting economic well-being and sustainable growth. March’s work promotes the preservation of companies’ competitiveness and sustainability in the fluctuating market environment by maintaining a ...
An Analysis of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger's Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation
1st Edition
By Charmi Patel
May 11, 2018
Social anthropologist Jean Lave and computer scientist Etienne Wenger’s seminal Situated Learning helped change the fields of cognitive science and pedagogy by approaching learning from a novel angle. Traditionally, theories of learning and education had focused on processes of cognition – the ...
An Analysis of John Berger's Ways of Seeing
1st Edition
By Emmanouil Kalkanis
May 11, 2018
Ways of Seeing is a key art-historical work that continues to provoke widespread debate. It is comprised of seven different essays, three of which are pictorial and the other containing texts and images. Berger first examines the relationship between seeing and knowing, discussing how our ...
An Analysis of Lucien Febvre's The Problem of Unbelief in the 16th Century
1st Edition
By Joseph Tendler
May 11, 2018
Febvre asked this core question in The Problem of Unbelief: “Could sixteenth-century people hold religious views that were not those of official, Church-sanctioned Christianity, or could they simply not believe at all?” The answer informed a wider debate on modern history, particularly modern ...
An Analysis of Ludwig von Mises's The Theory of Money and Credit
1st Edition
By Pádraig Belton
May 11, 2018
Ludwig Von Mises’s 1912 contribution to the theory of monetary policy and the current prevailing consensus in modern economic liberalism, The Theory of Money and Credit, was a milestone achievement. The author’s familiarity with the historical literature on banking and credit allows him to present ...
An Analysis of Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo
1st Edition
By Pádraig Belton
May 11, 2018
Mary Douglas is an outstanding example of an evaluative thinker at work. In Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, she delves in great detail into existing arguments that portray traditional societies as “evolving” from “savage” beliefs in magic, to religion, to modern ...
An Analysis of Philippe Aries's Centuries of Childhood
1st Edition
By Eva-Marie Prag, Joseph Tendler
May 11, 2018
A critical analysis of Centuries of Childhood, in which the French historian Philippe Aries offers a fundamentally fresh interpretation of what childhood is and what the institution means for society at large. Aries's core idea is that ‘childhood,’ as we understand it today – a special time ...
An Analysis of Pierre Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice
1st Edition
By Rodolfo Maggio
May 11, 2018
In Outline of a Theory of Practice, Bourdieu questions the preeminent ideas of social anthropologists such as Levi-Strauss who stressed the structural principles governing human action rather than the actions themselves and, Bourdieu asserts, doesn’t account for all observable nuances of behaviour....
An Analysis of Susan Sontag's On Photography
1st Edition
By Nico Epstein
May 11, 2018
Susan Sontag’s 1997 text, On Photography, brought photographic theory into the university classroom with its staunch defence of the medium as art and inspired a new wave of Marxist Criticism in the field. Sontag explains the way in which we are addicted to images and depend on them for ...
An Analysis of Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
1st Edition
By Rachele Dini
May 11, 2018
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction combats traditional art criticism’s treatment of artworks as fixed, unchanging mystical objects. For Walter Benjamin, the consequences of addressing a work of art in this manner have a wider resonance: closed off from any active visual or ...
An Analysis of Yasser Tabbaa's The Transformation of Islamic Art During the Sunni Revival
1st Edition
By Bilal Badat
May 11, 2018
Tabbaa’s Transformation offers an innovative approach to understanding the profound changes undergone by Islamic art and architecture during the often neglected Medieval Islamic period. Examining devices such as calligraphy, arabesque, muqarnas, and stonework, Tabbaa argues we propagated in a...
An Analysis of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet
1st Edition
By Christien Garcia
May 10, 2018
In this book, Sedgwick examines texts from Europe and America such as Wilde, Nietzsche and Proust and considers the historical moment when sexual orientation came to be as important a signifier of personhood as gender had been for centuries. In doing this, Sedgwick provides a history of sexuality ...