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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.
Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ is a key postmodern text and is widely taught in many disciplines as one of the first texts to embrace technology from a leftist and feminist perspective using the metaphor of the cyborg to champion a socialist, postmodern, and anti-identitarian politics. Until Haraway’…
Paperback – 2018-07-30
Macat Library
The Macat Library
Roland Barthes’s 1967 essay, "The Death of the Author," argues against the traditional practice of incorporating the intentions and biographical context of an author into textual interpretation because of the resultant limitations imposed on a text. Hailing "the birth of the reader," Barthes posits…
Paperback – 2018-06-04
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The Macat Library
In The Rights of Others, Benhabib argues that the transnational movement of people across the globe has brought to the fore fundamental dilemmas facing liberal democracies: tension between a state’s commitment to universal human rights, and to its sovereign self-determination and its claims to…
Paperback – 2018-05-15
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The Macat Library
"Distance Still Matters" is an influential Harvard Business Review article. In this work, Ghemawat proposes the CAGE distance framework that allows firms to consider four dimensions of international distance (cultural, administrative, geographic, and economic) when planning global expansion. Then,…
Paperback – 2018-05-15
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The Macat Library
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…
Paperback – 2018-05-15
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The Macat Library
In The Wisdom of Crowds, New Yorker columnist, Surowiecki, explores the question of whether the many are better than an elite few – no matter their qualifications – at solving problems, promoting innovation and making wise decisions. Surowiecki’s text uses multiple case studies and touches on the…
Paperback – 2018-05-15
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The Macat Library
Jacques Derrida’s Structure, Sign, and Play is one of the most controversial and influential philosophical texts of the 20th century. Delivered at a conference on structuralism at Johns Hopkins, the lecture took aim at the critical and philosophical fashions of the time and radically proposing a…
Paperback – 2018-05-15
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The Macat Library
Michel Foucault’s 1969 essay “What is an Author?” sidesteps the stormy arguments surrounding “intentional fallacy” and the “death of the author,” offering an entirely different way of looking at texts. Foucault points out that all texts are written but not all are discussed as having “authors”. So…
Paperback – 2018-05-15
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The Macat Library
The 1979 publication of Susan Gubar and Sandra M. Gilbert’s ground-breaking study The Madwoman in the Attic marked a founding moment in feminist literary history as much as feminist literary theory. In their extensive study of nineteenth-century women’s writing, Gubar and Gilbert offer radical…
Paperback – 2018-05-15
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The Macat Library
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,…
Paperback – 2018-05-15
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The Macat Library
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…
Paperback – 2018-05-15
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The Macat Library
The Defence of Poesy is the first major piece of literary criticism in English. Taking aim at classical authors who disparaged poetry, and contemporary critics who saw literature as a corrupting influence, Sidney foregrounds the moral force of poetry. Sidney considers the real life affects of…
Paperback – 2018-05-15
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The Macat Library
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…
Paperback – 2018-05-15
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The Macat Library
Martin Buber’s I and Thou argues that humans engage with the world in two ways. One is with the attitude of an ‘I’ towards an ‘It’, where the self stands apart from objects as items of experience or use. The other is with the attitude of an ‘I’ towards a ‘Thou’, where the self enters into real…
Paperback – 2018-05-15
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The Macat Library
On Religion is a major text for the development of modern religious thought in the West and its author, German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, is remembered as the Father of Modern Protestant Theology, as well as for his contributions to philosophy, ethics and hermeneutics. Comprising five…
Paperback – 2018-05-15
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The Macat Library
Written by the great medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed attempts to explain the perplexities of biblical language—and apparent inconsistencies in the text—in the light of philosophy and scientific reason. Composed as a letter to a student, The Guide aims to…
Paperback – 2018-05-15
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The Macat Library
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…
Paperback – 2018-05-15
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The Macat Library
Wright’s The New Testament and the People of God is the first volume of his acclaimed series ‘Christian Origins and the Question of God’ comprehensively addressing the historical and theological questions surrounding the origins of Christianity. The text outlines Wright's hermeneutical theory and…
Paperback – 2018-05-15
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The Macat Library
Erwin Panofsky’s Meaning in the Visual Arts is considered a key work in art history. Its ideas have provoked widespread debate, and although it was first published more than sixty years ago, it continues to feature regularly on numerous university reading lists. Meaning in the Visual Arts…
Paperback – 2018-05-15
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The Macat Library
Dynamic Capabilities and Strategic Management is a pioneering book in business studies, one of the most succinct and in-depth examinations of dynamic capabilities, explaining both their foundations and the strategic implications they hold for both academics and practitioners in the field of…
Paperback – 2018-04-30
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The Macat Library
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…
Paperback – 2018-02-22
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The Macat Library
The Dutch anthropologist Geert Hofstede is recognized as a pioneer in the fields of international management and social psychology – and his work is a perfect example of the ways in which interpretative skills can help solve problems and provide the foundation for strong thinking and understanding…
Paperback – 2018-02-21
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The Macat Library
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…
Paperback – 2018-02-21
Macat Library
The Macat Library
Burton Malkiel’s 1973 A Random Walk Down Wall Street was an explosive contribution to debates about how to reap a good return on investing in stocks and shares. Reissued and updated many times since, Malkiel’s text remains an indispensable contribution to the world of investment strategy – one that…
Paperback – 2018-02-21
Macat Library
The Macat Library
In Centuries of Childhood, 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 that requires special efforts and…
Paperback – 2018-02-21
Macat Library
The Macat Library
How do you solve a problem like understanding Iraq? For Hanna Batatu, the solution to this conundrum lay in generating alternative possibilities that effectively side-stepped the conventional wisdom of the time. Historians had long held that Iraq – like other artificial creations of ex-colonial…
Paperback – 2018-02-21
Macat Library
The Macat Library
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…
Paperback – 2018-02-21
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The Macat Library
Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics is a dense masterpiece of sustained argumentative reasoning. It earned its place as one of the most important and influential books in Western philosophy by virtue of its uncompromisingly direct arguments about the nature of God, the universe, free will, and human morals.…
Paperback – 2018-02-21
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The Macat Library
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…
Paperback – 2018-02-21
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The Macat Library
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.…
Paperback – 2018-02-21
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The Macat Library
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…
Paperback – 2018-02-21
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The Macat Library
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…
Paperback – 2018-02-21
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The Macat Library
Vision and Difference, published in 1988, is one of the most significant works in feminist visual culture arguing that feminist art history of is a political as well as academic endeavour. Pollock expresses how images are key to the construction of sexual difference, both in visual culture…
Paperback – 2018-02-21
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The Macat Library
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…
Paperback – 2018-02-21
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The Macat Library
Argyris’s Integrating The Individual and the Organization is part of a series of essays and books considering how organisations should be run. This essay explores the lack of congruence between the needs and expectations of individual employees and the organisations that employ them. Grounding his…
Paperback – 2018-02-21
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The Macat Library
Ikujiro Nonaka’s A Dynamic Theory of Organisational Knowledge Creation outlines the creation of organisational knowledge through the constant conversion of the two types of knowledge, tacit and explicit, which Nonaka believes has the potential to guide managers’ knowledge creation strategies. This…
Paperback – 2018-02-21
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The Macat Library
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…
Paperback – 2018-02-21
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The Macat Library
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…
Paperback – 2018-02-21
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The Macat Library
Amartya Sen’s Inequality Re-examined is a seminal text setting out a theory to evaluate social arrangements and inequality. By asking the question, ‘equality of what’?, Sen shows that (in)equality should be assessed as human freedom; for people to have the ability to pursue and achieve goals they…
Paperback – 2018-02-21
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The Macat Library
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman offers a general audience access to over six decades of insight and expertise from a Nobel Laureate in an accessible and interesting way. Kahneman’s work focuses largely on the problem of how we think, and warns of the dangers of trusting to intuition –…
Paperback – 2018-02-21
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The Macat Library
Few works of scholarship have so comprehensively recast an existing debate as Chinua Achebe’s essay on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Achebe – a highly distinguished Nigerian novelist and university teacher – looked with fresh eyes at a novel that was set in Africa, but in which Africans appear…
Paperback – 2017-07-15
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The Macat Library
A flagbearer for the increasingly fashionable genre of "transnational history," Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands is, first and foremost, a stunning example of the critical thinking skill of evaluation. Snyder's linguistic precocity allows him to cite evidence in 10 languages, putting fresh twists on the…
Paperback – 2017-07-15
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The Macat Library
How was the Soviet Union like a soup kitchen? In this important and highly revisionist work, historian Sheila Fitzpatrick explains that a reimagining of the Communist state as a provider of goods for the ‘deserving poor’ can be seen as a powerful metaphor for understanding Soviet life as a whole.…
Paperback – 2017-07-15
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The Macat Library
Joan Scott's work has influenced several generations of historians and helped make the topic of gender central to the way in which the discipline is taught and studied today. At root a new way of conceptualizing capitalist societies, Scott's theories suggest that gender is better understood as a…
Paperback – 2017-07-15
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The Macat Library
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…
Paperback – 2017-07-15
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The Macat Library
Richard Evans wrote In Defence of History at a time when the historian's profession was coming under heavy attack as a result of the ‘cultural turn’ taken by the discipline during the late 1980s and the 1990s. Historians were being forced to face up to postmodern thinking, which argued that,…
Paperback – 2017-07-15
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The Macat Library
Despite having no formal training in urban planning, Jane Jacobs deftly explores the strengths and weaknesses of policy arguments put forward by American urban planners in the era after World War II. They believed that the efficient movement of cars was of more value in the development of US cities…
Paperback – 2017-07-15
Macat Library
The Macat Library
For many centuries, the history of the crusades, as written by Western historians, was based solidly on Western sources. Evidence from the Islamic societies that the crusaders attacked was used only sparingly – in part because it was hard for most westerners to read, and in part because much of it…
Paperback – 2017-07-15
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The Macat Library
Georges Lefebvre was one of the most highly-regarded historians of the 20th century – and a key reason for the high reputation he enjoys can be found in The Coming of the French Revolution. Lefebvre's key contribution to the debate over what remains arguably one of history's most contentious and…
Paperback – 2017-07-15
Macat Library
The Macat Library
Few historical problems are more baffling in retrospect than the conundrum of how Hitler was able to rise to power in Germany and then command the German people – many of whom had only marginal interest in or affiliation to Nazism – and the Nazi state. It took Ian Kershaw – author of the standard…
Paperback – 2017-07-15
Macat Library
The Macat Library