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.
By John Donaldson, Ian Jackson
July 20, 2017
David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is a philosophical classic that displays a powerful mastery of the critical thinking skills of reasoning and evaluation. Hume’s subject, the question of the existence and possible nature of God, was, and still is, a persistent topic of ...
By Jarrod Homer
July 20, 2017
David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd: A Study in the Changing American Character is one of the best-known books in the history of sociology – holding a mirror up to contemporary America and showing the nation its own character as it had never seen it before. Its success is a testament to Riesman’s ...
By Stoyan Stoyanov, Monique Diderich
July 20, 2017
What makes a good manager? Though we can probably all point to someone we think of as a good manager, what precisely makes them so good at their job is a complex question – and one central to good business organization. Management scholar Douglas McGregor’s seminal 1960 book The Human Side of ...
By Kitty Wheater
July 20, 2017
The history of anthropology is, to a large extent, the history of differing modes of interpretation. As anthropologists have long known, examining, analyzing and recording cultures in the quest to understand humankind as a whole is a vastly complex task, in which nothing can be achieved without ...
By Jason Schukraft
July 20, 2017
For 2,000 years, the standard philosophical model of knowledge was that it could be defined as a justified true belief. According to this way of thinking, we can know, for example, that we are human because [1] we believe ourselves to be human; [2] that belief is justified (others treat us as ...
By Jarrod Homer
July 20, 2017
Elaine Tyler May’s 1988 Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era is a ground-breaking piece of historical and cultural analysis that uses its findings to build a strong argument for its author’s view of the course of modern US history. The aim of May’s study is to trace the links ...
By Simon Thomson
July 20, 2017
Few historians trace grand themes across many centuries and places, but Ernst Kantorowicz's great work on the symbolic powers of kingship is a fine example of what can happen when they do. The King's Two Bodies is at once a superb example of the critical thinking skill of evaluation – assessing ...
By Ian Jackson, Jason Xidias
July 20, 2017
Francis Fukuyama’s controversial 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man demonstrates an important aspect of creative thinking: the ability to generate hypotheses and create novel explanations for evidence. In the case of Fukuyama’s work, the central hypothesis and explanation he put forward...
By Riley Quinn
July 20, 2017
Frantz Fanon is one of the most important figures in the history of what is now known as postcolonial studies – the field that examines the meaning and impacts of European colonialism across the world. Born in the French colony of Martinique, Fanon worked as a psychiatrist in Algeria, another ...
By David Linden, Nick Broten
July 13, 2017
Friedrich Hayek’s 1944 Road to Serfdom is a classic of conservative economic argument. While undeniably a product of a specific time in global politics – which saw the threat of fascism from Nazi Germany and its allies beguilingly answered by the promises of socialism – Hayek’s carefully ...
By Jonny Blamey, Jon W. Thompson
July 20, 2017
Elizabeth Anscombe’s 1958 essay “Modern Moral Philosophy” is a cutting intervention in modern philosophy that shows the full power of good evaluative and analytical critical thinking skills. Though only 16 pages long, Anscombe’s paper set out to do nothing less than reform the entire field of ...
By Ian Jackson
July 20, 2017
Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit is renowned for being one of the most challenging and important books in Western philosophy. Above all, it is famous for laying out a new approach to reasoning and philosophical argument, an approach that has been credited with influencing Karl Marx, Jean-Paul ...