Macat

Published in 1961, the year of Frantz Fanon's death, The Wretched of the Earth is both a powerful analysis of the psychological effects of colonization and a rallying cry for violent uprising and independence. The book rejects colonial assumptions that the people of colonized countries need to be guided by their European colonizers because they are somehow less evolved or civilized. Fanon argues that violence is justified to purge colonialism not...

Jared M. Diamond clearly identifies five major factors that he says determine the success or failure of all human societies in all periods of history. Having first asked why societies collapse, Diamond explores various examples of failed societies, from the Norsemen of Scandinavia, who colonized Greenland in the early tenth century, to the eighteenth-century inhabitants of Easter Island. As a counterpoint, he shows how inhabitants of Highland New...

In his 1997 work Guns, Germs, and Steel, American geography professor and environmental historian Jared Diamond looks to answer the question of why human history unfolded differently on different continents, and why power and wealth became distributed as they are. Drawing on evidence from a diverse range of disciplines, Diamond argues that the varying rates of human development over the past 13,000 years have had very little to do with genetic superiority....

Because the potential returns appear to be greater in poorer countries than in the developed world, modern economic theory implies that rich countries should continually invest in poor countries until returns balance out. In fact, this doesn't happen. Economist Robert E. Lucas Jr. asks why in his groundbreaking 1990 article, "Why Doesn't Capital Flow from Rich to Poor Countries?" The question has become known as the Lucas paradox. Lucas analyzes this,...

One of the most influential books on economics ever written, Thomas Robert Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population remains one of the most controversial too. This 1798 work inspired naturalists Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace to develop the theory of natural selection. But it has also sparked criticism-Karl Marx famously called Malthus a "lackey of the bourgeoisie." Yet this hasn't stopped leading present-day environmentalists from...

Published in 1990, The Anti-Politics Machine is American anthropologist James Ferguson's first book. It discusses international development projects: how they are conceived, researched, and put into practice. Importantly, it also looks at what these projects actually achieve. Ferguson is critical of the idea of development and argues that the process does not take enough account of the daily realities of the communities it is intended to benefit....

In his 1807 work Phenomenology of Spirit, G. W. F. Hegel introduced the world to his philosophical system. His most influential work-and the culmination of the German Idealist movement begun in the late eighteenth century as a response to the works of Immanuel Kant-the book remains one of the undisputed classics of Western thought. The first major work of Western philosophy to introduce the idea that the truths of philosophy are inseparable not only...

This is a book for anyone who wants to understand exactly what we mean by ethics and morality today. One of the most vital and controversial works in the twentieth-century world of moral philosophy, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue examines how we think about, talk about, and act out our moral views in the modern world. Finding that the ways in which we engage in our moral reasoning have no common standard of judgment, MacIntyre's 1981 book challenges...

The ideas set out by American international relations expert Robert O. Keohane in 1984's After Hegemony have had a huge impact on policy debates over the last three decades, both in political circles and in academia. Hegemony means the social, cultural, ideological, or economic influence of one dominant group. Contemplating a post-Cold War world half a decade before the Berlin Wall fell, Keohane asks if international cooperation can survive in the...

Iranian American writer and scholar Hamid Dabashi wrote Iran: A People Interrupted amid the political fallout following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York-his adopted city-in 2001. As US President George W. Bush declared a "war on terror" and named Iran as part of an "axis of evil" that supported terrorism, Dabashi offered an insider's insight into the Iranian psyche. The book explores more than 200 years of Iran's cultural history. It shows...