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 David Brion Davis's The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823
1st Edition
By Duncan Money, Jason Xidas
August 18, 2017
How was it possible for opponents of slavery to be so vocal in opposing the practice, when they were so accepting of the economic exploitation of workers in western factories – many of which were owned by prominent abolitionists? David Brion Davis's The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, ...
An Analysis of Emile Durkheim's On Suicide
1st Edition
By Robert Easthope
August 18, 2017
Emile Durkheim’s 1897 On Suicide is widely recognized as one of the foundational classic texts of sociology. It is also one that shows the degree to which strong interpretative skills can often provide the bedrock for high-level analysis. Durkheim's aim was to analyse the nature of suicide in the ...
An Analysis of Eric Hoffer's The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
1st Edition
By Jonah S. Rubin
August 18, 2017
Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements is one of the most widely read works of social psychology written in the 20th-century. It exemplifies the powers of creative thinking and critical analysis at their best, providing an insight into two crucial elements of ...
An Analysis of James Ferguson's The Anti-Politics Machine
1st Edition
By Julie Jenkins
August 18, 2017
The Anti-Politics Machine (1990) examines how international development projects are conceived, researched, and put into practice. It also looks at what these projects actually achieve. Ferguson criticizes the idea of externally-directed ‘development’ and argues that the process doesn’t take proper...
An Analysis of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
1st Edition
By Ryan Moore
August 18, 2017
Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is an unflinching dissection of the racial biases built into the American prison system. Named after the laws that enforced racial segregation in the southern United States until the mid-1960s, The New Jim Crow ...
An Analysis of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
1st Edition
By Eric Lybeck
August 18, 2017
One of the primary qualities of good creative thinking is an intellectual freedom to think outside of the box. Good creative thinkers resist orthodox ideas, take new lines of enquiry, and generally come at problems from the kinds of angles almost no one else could. And, what is more, when the ideas...
An Analysis of Robert A. Dahl's Democracy and its Critics
1st Edition
By Astrid Noren Nilsson, Elizabeth Morrow, Riley Quinn
August 18, 2017
There are few better examples of analysis – the critical thinking skill of understanding how an argument is built – than Robert Dahl’s Democracy and its Critics. In this work, the American political theorist closely analyzes the democratic political system and then evaluates whether the arguments ...
An Analysis of Robert O. Keohane's After Hegemony
1st Edition
By Ramon Pacheco Pardo
August 18, 2017
Robert O. Keohane’s After Hegemony is both a classic of international relations scholarship and an example of how creative thinking can help shed new light on the world. Since the end of World War II, the global political landscape had been dominated by two superpowers, the USA and the USSR, and ...
An Analysis of Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams
1st Edition
By William Jenkins
August 18, 2017
There is arguably no more famous book about the arts of interpretation and analysis than Sigmund Freud’s 1899 Interpretation of Dreams. Though the original edition of just 600 copies took eight years to sell out, it eventually became a classic text that helped cement Freud’s reputation as one of ...
An Analysis of Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined
1st Edition
By Joulia Smortchkova
August 18, 2017
Reasoning is the critical thinking skill concerned with the production of arguments: making them coherent, consistent, and well-supported; and responding to opposing positions where necessary. The Better Angels of Our Nature offers a step-by-step class in precisely these skills. Author Steven ...
An Analysis of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man
1st Edition
By Mariana Assis, Jason Xidias
August 18, 2017
Thomas Paine’s 1791 Rights of Man is an impassioned political tract showing how the critical thinking skills of evaluation and reasoning can, and must, be applied to contentious issues. Divided into two parts, Rights of Man is, first, a response to Edmund Burke’s arguments against the French ...
An Analysis of Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War
1st Edition
By Mark Fisher
August 18, 2017
Few works can claim to form the foundation stones of one entire academic discipline, let alone two, but Thucydides's celebrated History of the Peloponnesian War is not only one of the first great works of history, but also the departure point from which the modern discipline of international ...