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 Alexander O’Connor
July 05, 2017
What makes good people capable of committing bad – even evil – acts? Few psychologists are as well-qualified to answer that question as Philip Zimbardo, a psychology professor who was not only the author of the classic Stanford Prison Experiment – which asked two groups of students to assume the ...
By Nikki Springer
July 05, 2017
Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring is one of the few books that can claim to be epoch-making. Its closely reasoned attack on the use of pesticides in American agriculture helped thrust environmental consciousness to the fore of modern politics and policy, creating the regulatory landscape we know ...
By Nicola Davis
July 05, 2017
Richard Dawkins provides excellent examples of his reasoning and interpretation skills in The Selfish Gene. His 1976 book is not a work of original research, but instead a careful explanation of evolution, combined with an argument for a particular interpretation of several aspects of evolution. ...
By Pádraig Belton
July 05, 2017
Robert Lucas is known among economists as one of the most influential macroeconomists of recent times – a reputation founded in no small part on the critical thinking skills displayed in his seminal 1990 paper ‘Why Doesn’t Capital Flow from Rich to Poor Countries?’ Lucas’s paper tackles a puzzle ...
By Riley Quinn
July 05, 2017
The end of the Cold War, which occurred early in the 1990s, brought joy and freedom to millions. But it posed a difficult question to the world's governments and to the academics who studied them: how would world order be remade in an age no longer dominated by the competing ideologies of ...
By Ramon Pacheco Pardo
July 05, 2017
Sun Tzu's The Art of War is a series of lessons in the applied art of problem solving. Sun (544 BC-496 BC), an experienced general from the Warring States period of Chinese history, saw war as an inevitable problem – indeed, the ultimate problem confronting the state. The Art of War summarises his...
By Stoyan Stoyanov
July 04, 2017
US psychologist Abraham H. Maslow’s A Theory of Human Motivation is a classic of psychological research that helped change the field for good. Like many field-changing thinkers, Maslow was not just a talented researcher, he was also a creative thinker – able to see things from a new perspective and...
By Birgit Koopmann-Holm, Alexander O'Connor
July 04, 2017
The work of memory researchers Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch is a prime example of the ways in which good critical thinkers approach questions and the problems they raise. In the 1960s, researchers into human memory began to understand memory as comprising not one, but two systems. The first was ...
By Jacqueline Allan
July 04, 2017
Albert Bandura is the most cited living psychologist, and is regularly named as one of the most influential figures ever to have worked in his field. Much of his reputation stems from the theories and experiments described in his 1973 study Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis – a book that is ...
By Brown, Bryan Gibson
July 04, 2017
Few works of history make as well-structured a case for the importance of studying continuity, rather than change, than Albert Hourani's A History of the Arab Peoples. Hourani’s work had three major aims: to refute the idea that Arab society stagnated between 1000 and 1800; to study the period ...
By Joshua Specht, Etienne Stockland
July 04, 2017
One criticism of history is that historians all too often study it in isolation, failing to take advantage of models and evidence from scholars in other disciplines. This is not a charge that can be laid at the door of Alfred Crosby. His book The Columbian Exchange not only incorporates the results...
By Asiste Celkyte
July 04, 2017
Aristotle’s Metaphysics is a collection of essays on a wide range of topics, almost certainly never put together by Aristotle himself. This helps to explain why the material covers such a very wide range of material, from meaning to mathematics, from logical sequences to religion. It includes very ...