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 Tom Stammers
July 15, 2017
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 ...
By Alexander O’Connor
July 15, 2017
With his 1954 book The Nature of Prejudice, American psychologist Gordon Allport displays the crucial skill of reasoning, producing and organizing an argument that was persuasive enough to have a major impact not only in universities, but also on government policy. The question that Allport ...
By Marthe Hesselmans, Jonathan Teubner
July 04, 2017
Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez wanted to solve the problem of how the church could conduct itself to improve the lives of the poor, while consistently positioning itself as politically neutral. Despite being a deeply religious man, Gutiérrez was extremely troubled by the lukewarm way in which ...
By Sulaiman Hakemy
July 15, 2017
South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang used his 2003 work Kicking Away The Ladder to challenge the central orthodoxies of development economics, using his creative thinking skills to shine new light on an old topic. Creative thinkers are often distinguished by their willingness to challenge received...
By Bryan Gibson
July 15, 2017
Hamid Dabashi’s 2007 Iran: A People Interrupted is simultaneously subtle, passionate, polarizing and polemical. A concise account of Iranian history from the early 19th-century onward, Dabashi’s book uses his incisive analytical skills as a basis for creating a persuasive argument against the views...
By Sahar Aurore Saeidnia, Anthony Lang
July 15, 2017
Hannah Arendt’s 1958 The Human Condition was an impassioned philosophical reconsideration of the goals of being human. In its arguments about the kind of lives we should lead and the political engagement we should strive for, Arendt’s interpretative skills come to the fore, in a brilliant display ...
By Mano Toth, Jason Xidias
July 15, 2017
In Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau looks at old issues in new ways, asking: is there ever a time when individuals should actively oppose their government and its justice system? After a thorough review of the evidence, Thoreau comes to the conclusion that opposition is legitimate whenever ...
By Helen Roche
July 15, 2017
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 ...
By Ian Jackson
July 15, 2017
The eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant is as daunting as he is influential: widely considered to be not only one of the most challenging thinkers of all time, but also one of the most important. His Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason takes on two of his central preoccupations –...
By Etienne Stockland
July 15, 2017
Understanding why revolutions take place when they do, and as they do, is important in itself. Understanding how they are rooted in the societies they upend – and the ways in which those societies share crucial similarities – is arguably even more so. The enduring influence of Jack Goldstone's ...
By Martin Fuller, Ryan Moore
July 15, 2017
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...
By Anna Seiferle-Valencia
July 15, 2017
Why is it that children from disadvantaged backgrounds find it so difficult – and often impossible – to achieve? Few questions are of such fundamental importance to the functioning of a fair and effective society than this one, yet the academic and political narratives that exist to explain the ...