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 St. Augustine's The City of God Against the Pagans
1st Edition
By Jonathan D. Teubner
May 02, 2018
The City of God against the Pagans is a central text in the Western intellectual tradition. Made up of twenty-two lengthy books, Augustine wrote his masterpiece over a thirteen-year period during which the Western Roman Empire began to unravel. The first ten books are a critique of pagan religion ...
An Analysis of Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare
1st Edition
By Liam Haydon
May 02, 2018
What is a self? Greenblatt argues that the 16th century saw the awakening of modern self-consciousness, the ability to fashion an identity out of the culture and politics of one’s society. In a series of brilliant readings, Greenblatt shows how identity is constructed in the work of Shakespeare, ...
An Analysis of William H. Whyte's The Organization Man
1st Edition
By Nikki Springer
May 02, 2018
William Whyte’s core idea in The Organization Man is that the Protestant Ethic that characterized financial and personal success in American history had been replaced in modern times by the Social Ethic. This stressed the group as the source of creativity and emphasized that the greatest need of ...
An Analysis of William Wordsworth's Preface to The Lyrical Ballads
1st Edition
By Alex Latter, Rachel Teubner
May 02, 2018
Central to the creative process of the Romantic poets that followed him, Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads has been both a gift and a thorn in the side of critics for over a century. Readers find themselves drawn back to the essay repeatedly as they seek to untangle the ideas and ...
An Analysis of C.L.R. James's The Black Jacobins
1st Edition
By Nick Broten
February 02, 2018
Today we take it for granted that history is much more than the story of great men and the elites from which they spring. Other forms of history – the histories of gender, class, rebellion and nonconformity – add much-needed context and color to our understanding of the past. But this has not ...
An Analysis of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
1st Edition
By Ruth Scobie
September 07, 2017
Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Women is an incendiary attack on the place of women in 18th-century society. Often considered to be the earliest widely-circulated work of feminism, the book is a powerful example of what can be achieved by creative thinkers – people who ...
An Analysis of Saba Mahmood's Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject
1st Edition
By Jessica Johnson, Ian Fairweather
August 29, 2017
Saba Mahmood’s 2005 Politics of Piety is an excellent example of evaluation in action. Mahmood’s book is a study of women’s participation in the Islamic revival across the Middle East. Mahmood – a feminist social anthropologist with left-wing, secular political values – wanted to understand why ...
An Analysis of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay's The Federalist Papers
1st Edition
By Jeremy Kleidosty, Jason Xidias
August 18, 2017
The 85 essays that maker up The Federalist Papers’ clearly demonstrate the vital importance of the art of persuasion. Written between 1787 and 1788 by three of the “Founding Fathers” of the United States, the Papers were written with the specific intention of convincing Americans that it was in ...
An Analysis of Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom
1st Edition
By Janna Miletzki, Nick Broten
August 18, 2017
Amartya Sen uses his 1999 work Development as Freedom to evaluate the processes and outcomes of economic development. Having come to the conclusion that development is best summed up as the expansion of freedom, Sen examines traditional definitions and understandings of the term. He says people ...
An Analysis of Arjun Appadurai's Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation
1st Edition
By Amy Young Evrard
August 18, 2017
Arjun Appadurai’s 1996 collection of essays Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization helped reshape how anthropologists, geographers and philosophers saw and understood the key topic of our times: globalization. Globalization has long been recognized as one of the crucial factors ...
An Analysis of C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel's The Core Competence of the Corporation
1st Edition
By The Macat Team
August 18, 2017
C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel’s 1990 The Core Competence of the Corporation helped redefine traditional ideas of management strategy. It did so by focusing companies on one of the key critical thinking skills: evaluation. In critical thinking, evaluation is all about judging the strengths and ...
An Analysis of Christopher R. Browning's Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
1st Edition
By Tom Stammers, James Chappel
August 18, 2017
Of all the controversies facing historians today, few are more divisive or more important than the question of how the Holocaust was possible. What led thousands of Germans – many of them middle-aged reservists with, apparently, little Nazi zeal – to willingly commit acts of genocide? Was it ...