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 Mark Scarlata
May 02, 2018
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 ...
By The Macat Team
September 26, 2019
Marcel Mauss’s 1925 essay The Gift is an enduring classic of sociological and anthropological analysis by a thinker who is one of the founding fathers of modern anthropology. The Gift exploits Mauss’s high-level analytical and interpretative skills to produce a brilliant investigation of the forms...
By Rebecca Pohl
September 17, 2018
Haraway’s ‘A 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 socialist, postmodern, and anti-identitarian politics. Until Haraway’...
By Veselina Stoyanova
July 31, 2018
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 ...
By Tim Smith-Laing
May 10, 2018
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 ...
By Nikki Springer
May 10, 2018
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 ...
By Simon Ravenscroft
May 10, 2018
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 ...
By Benjamin Laird
May 10, 2018
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 ...
By Alessandro Giudici, Marianna Rolbina
May 14, 2018
"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, ...
By Elise Klein
May 11, 2018
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 ...
By Gary Slater, Andreas Vrahimis
May 11, 2018
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. ...
By Nicholas Burton
May 11, 2018
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...
