Macat Library
audiobook
(2)
A Macat Analysis of Sheila Fitzpatrick's Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times
by Victor Petrov
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
In 1999's Everyday Stalinism, historian Sheila Fitzpatrick rejects the common practice of simplistically treating the Soviet Union as a totalitarian government that tightly controlled its citizens. She takes advantage of vast archives that were released after the Cold War to examine Soviet society "from below"-looking at how ordinary citizens coped with shortages and the general sense of fear created by the state. Despite government efforts to mold its citizens into perfect reflections of communist ideology, in practice everyday people found ways to live everyday lives. Their coping mechanisms played an important role in how major events unfolded, including forced industrialization and the Great Purge, in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed by the state.
Fitzpatrick's influence on our modern understanding of Soviet society goes beyond her own works. Everyday Stalinism has inspired younger historians to dig deeper into Soviet social life, exploring the mindset of average citizens as they tried to lead ordinary lives in what were undoubtedly extraordinary times.
audiobook
(0)
A Macat Analysis of Carlo Ginzburg's The Night Battles: Witchcraft & Agrarian Cults in the 16th &
by Etienne Stockland
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
In his 1966 book The Night Battles, Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg detailed the lives of peasant people who were marginalized in their own society and have been all but forgotten in ours. He created a new school of study, "microhistory," which has influenced thinkers from a range of different disciplines.
The Night Battles looks at the witch trials of a small group of peasants in sixteenth-century Italy who believed they turned into animals at night to ward off evil spirits and safeguard their crops. Ginzburg's analysis of available primary sources creates a remarkably detailed picture of this shamanism, which he claims could be traced back as far as 1500 years.
Ginzburg issued a challenge to late-twentieth-century academic norms-and pioneered new historical research techniques in doing so. Today, readers turn to The Night Battles not only for its account of a series of witch trials, but for Ginzburg's ground-breaking analysis of the ways prevailing ideologies re-interpret, create, and impose new meanings on popular practices.
audiobook
(2)
A Macat Analysis of Immanuel Kant's Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason
by Ian Jackson
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
Do we need the rules of religion in order to be good people? The German philosopher Immanuel Kant tackles this question in his 1793 text Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. More than 200 years later, it is still a key text in the shaping of Western religious thought, as well as Kant's most direct discussion of religious themes.
Kant tries to look at religious practices in relation to the Enlightenment movement-of which he was a part-and its firmly held beliefs in the power of reason and personal liberty.
He does not argue against religious belief itself, but against certain religious practices imposed by the Church. For Kant, true moral conduct doesn't need such interference when human beings naturally know what is morally right.
The book was controversial because of Kant's unorthodox views and resulted in a royal order requesting that he stop writing about religion, which he did-for several years.
Religion is still important for understanding Kant's many ideas on moral philosophy and politics, freedom of expression, and religious belief.
audiobook
(0)
A Macat Analysis of Michael R. Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi's A General Theory of Crime
by William J. Jenkins
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
Michael R. Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi's 1990 work, A General Theory of Crime, assessed contemporary work in criminology, while also introducing a new, comprehensive theory of crime.
At the time, researchers tended to focus on environmental factors that led to crime, not on the criminals themselves. Additionally, crime researchers came from different disciplines and inclined towards thinking about crime only from their particular academic perspective. This meant ideas about what caused crime, and how to prevent it, were often in conflict.
Gottfredson and Hirschi believed criminology should get back to its roots by examining how crime is connected to human behavior. Drawing on important philosophers like Jeremy Bentham and Thomas Hobbes, they developed their self-control theory of crime, suggesting all crime can be explained by the amount of self-control a person can exercise. Gottfredson and Hirschi claimed their theory could explain all types of crime in all contexts, and they hoped it would inspire new research and new policy decisions. The book became hugely influential and is still relevant today.
audiobook
(0)
A Macat Analysis of John Lewis Gaddis's We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History
by Scott Gilfillan
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
What really happened when the world's two greatest superpowers went head to head during the Cold War? We Now Know is a major reappraisal of the struggle for political and ideological supremacy between the United States and the Soviet Union from 1945 to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
Published in 1997 by Pulitzer Prize-winning American John Lewis Gaddis-"The Dean Of Cold War Historians" according to the New York Times-We Now Know uses fascinating and previously unavailable source material. New documents from the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe allow Gaddis to produce the first-ever comparative international history of the Cold War.
The book takes a detailed look at this unique conflict, putting forward new theories about why two ideologically opposed empires rose up and how their long power struggle dominated international affairs.
Gaddis received America's prestigious National Humanities Medal for "deepening the nation's understanding" and We Now Know is still crucial to anyone fascinated by this incredible period in international history.
audiobook
(1)
A Macat Analysis of G.E.M. Anscombe's Modern Moral Philosophy
by Jonny Blamey
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
In her 1958 article "Modern Moral Philosophy", British philosopher Elizabeth (G. E. M.) Anscombe does nothing less than challenge the very foundations of moral philosophy, the discipline that tries to understand right and wrong action. The article sets out three main ideas. First, that moral philosophy should not be explored until a philosophy of psychology is already in place. Second, that philosophers who do not believe in God should not use ideas about "obligation" and "duty". Why? Because they are a hangover from an earlier, more religious time, when moral philosophy was based on our relation to God. Last, that modern philosophers had been unoriginal and had been united in their belief that only consequences matter to morality.
Anscombe's article helped to promote virtue ethics, which considers a person's moral character when evaluating ethical behavior. This provided an important alternative to the dominant schools of thought at the time, schools that focused on judgments about ethics based on set rules (deontology) or on actions that produced the best outcome for the most people (utilitarianism).
audiobook
(5)
A Macat Analysis of Abraham H. Maslow's A Theory of Human Motivation
by Stoyan Stoyanov
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
US psychologist Abraham Maslow's 1943 essay "A Theory of Human Motivation" established his idea of humanistic psychology as a "third force" in the field. Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis developed the idea of understanding the mind through dialogue between patient and analyst. The behaviorism of Ivan Pavlov and John Watson focused on comprehending it through behaviors that can be measured, trained, and changed. Maslow, however, outlined a new approach to understanding the mind, saying humans are motivated by their need to satisfy a series of hierarchical needs, starting with the most essential first. He thought it important for the advancement of psychology to identify, group, and rank them in terms of priority.
While Maslow's psychological influence may have declined since his death in 1970, his most recognizable legacy is this concept of a "hierarchy of needs." It remains highly significant in the fields of strategy, marketing, and management, where it is believed that his ideas can lead to higher productivity if applied to the running of organizations.
audiobook
(0)
James March's "Exploration and Exploitation in Organisational Learning"
A Macat Analysis
by James March
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
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 balance between exploration and exploitation processes. He explicates that this balance depends on the interchange between the adaptive capability of the company, predictability and consistency, competition, anticipations, level of risk, learning, socialization dynamics within the organization, and the overall environmental turbulence. These intricacies make March's text invaluable.
audiobook
(3)
A Macat Analysis of Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom
by Janna Miletzki
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
Economist Amartya Sen's 1997 work Development as Freedom presents a "middle way" approach to how we should look at international development, based on the idea that its success or failure cannot be measured by income alone. Having grown up in India, Sen brings his own understanding of what poverty really means to the issue, arguing that above all the process and goal of development must be human freedom. He backs up this idea through his concept of "capabilities"-the capacity a person has to do the things he or she believes make for a good life. Only by looking at the "capability set" of groups within different societies is it possible to truly evaluate and compare relative freedoms. And only then can the real impact of development be measured. Sen acknowledges the roles of economic markets and states in expanding freedom, and concludes that democratic control is crucial if development is to succeed in a meaningful way. Development as Freedom is a key text in the field of development economics, because it helped create a way of looking at the subject that pushed well beyond traditional models.
audiobook
(1)
A Macat Analysis of James Ferguson's The Anti-Politics Machine: "Development," Depoliticization,
by Julie Jenkins
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
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. The projects put too much emphasis on providing technical solutions for addressing poverty, such as better resources or improved infrastructure. But these solutions often ignore the fact that there are social and political dimensions to poverty. So the structures that development projects put in place can often have unintended consequences for their target community, such as strengthening the state power that allowed the projects to get underway in the first place. Ferguson argues that these problems start in the planning stages of a development project as a result of the information gathered and the very language used to discuss it. Ferguson's work suggests that until the process becomes less formulaic and more reflective, development projects will continue to fail.
audiobook
(5)
A Macat Analysis of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own
by Fiona Robinson
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
Even as recently as the 1920s the historical lack of great female writers was often considered as evidence of women's inferiority. Virginia Woolf disagreed. In her 1929 essay A Room of One's Own, she argues that creativity is impossible without privacy and freedom from financial worries-and that throughout history women have had neither. As a result, no tradition of great female writing existed to inspire women. Woolf's focus on the everyday suppression of women was a turning point in feminism, marking a realization that gaining legal and voting rights was just the first step on the road to true equality. Ordinary, everyday life had to be altered too. Woolf's writing inspired a generation of feminist writing and thinking. Her essay remains deeply relevant and valid today, providing a framework for analysis of any social group suffering injustice.
audiobook
(1)
A Macat Analysis of Franz Boas's Race, Language and Culture
by Anna Seiferle-Valencia
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
Born in 1858, Franz Boas permanently changed the standards and practices of anthropology. A German-born secular Jew, he became known for his distinctive approach to the discipline-non-hierarchical, open to diverse inputs, and unbiased.
Throughout his career, Boas used his scholarship to effect social change. His work convinced his colleagues to abandon the theories that had decided one race (Caucasian) and one culture (Western European) were more fully developed and worthier than others. In Boas's wake, anthropologists everywhere have been challenged to conduct their research and present their findings ethically. Boas spoke out against eugenics-the science of improving a population by controlled breeding-long before leaders in Nazi Germany embraced it. He was also a keen supporter of the Civil Rights movement in the United States.
Boas's 1940 work Race, Language and Culture brings together a half-century's worth of his groundbreaking scholarship in one volume. Some 75 years after its initial publication, it remains a key text in the field of anthropology.
audiobook
(0)
A Macat Analysis of Frederick Jackson Turner's The Significance of the Frontier in American History
by Joanna Dee Das
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
It was the vast frontier stretching out to the west of the developed land on the North American continent that shaped the American character-and the course of US history. That's the argument in historian Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." Anthologized and reprinted many times, it gave historians a new lens with which to analyze the United States.
Turner argues that in interacting with both the wilderness and Native Americans, settlers on the frontier developed institutions and character traits quite distinct from Europe. The West's surplus of "free land," Turner suggests, helped America become a country of economic opportunity, where democracy and individualism could flourish.
Turner's work captured the imagination of ordinary Americans. Countless television shows, films, novels, and even a theme park-Disney World's "Frontierland"-have based their depictions of the American West on this important essay.
audiobook
(1)
A Macat Analysis of John A. Hobson's Imperialism: A Study
by Riley Quinn
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
John A. Hobson's 1902 book Imperialism: A Study presents an original and controversial interpretation of the forces that motivated Britain to conquer foreign lands in the eighteenth century. Hobson advances the idea that ultra-wealthy financiers consciously worked to manipulate political leaders, all so they could invest money and sell goods in the outposts of a country's empire. Hobson built his argument on an economic theory he called "underconsumptionism," claiming that the wealthy had accumulated much more money than they could ever invest at home. By contrast, new British territories gave them an ideal environment to place their money abroad. In his lifetime, Hobson saw his conspiracy theory dismissed and scorned. Yet Imperialism is now seen as an important and powerful criticism of imperial policy. It helped inspire Vladimir Lenin to write Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, and will always be relevant for as long as states pursue aggressive foreign policies for economic gains.
audiobook
(0)
A Macat Analysis of Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams
by William J. Jenkins
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
Sigmund Freud was born in 1856, in Vienna, Austria, and died in London in 1939, but his reputation as "the father of psychoanalysis" lives on. The theories he introduced in his masterwork, The Interpretation of Dreams, revolutionized the treatment of mental illness in the late nineteenth century.
Based on his success in using new techniques he had developed with his patients, and on conclusions he drew from analyzing his own dreams, Freud said that dreams offered a window into the workings of the unconscious mind. So decoding dreams could help people understand the emotions underlying their actions.
Some criticized Freud's theories for being based on anecdotes rather than provable facts. In time, those criticisms contributed to Freud and his work being marginalized. But technology now allows scientists to test Freud's theories in a way that was not possible in his day. The new science of neuropsychoanalysis continues the work Freud began when he first published this book nearly 125 years ago.
audiobook
(3)
A Macat Analysis of René Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy
by Andreas Vrahimis
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
In his 1641 work Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes poses questions about the nature of knowledge and the nature of being that philosophers still debate today.
Among the general public, Descartes is probably most famous for his pronouncement "I think, therefore I am." That statement first appeared in an earlier work, but he expands on it in Meditations as he considers the idea of the mind as a separate entity to the body-the "dualist" approach. Descartes also set out to dispel skepticism-the idea that one cannot truly know anything. Using his "methodological skepticism," he showed that by doubting everything, we can know some things beyond doubt. From this point of certainty, he discusses a range of subjects, and offers a rational proof of existence of God.
Many of the questions Descartes asked remain relevant today. How does the physical brain relate to the mind? Does "thought" require a body? What can we know with certainty? Does God exist? We continue to ask them, because we still don't have the answers.
audiobook
(0)
A Macat Analysis of Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848
by Tom Stammers
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
In The Age of Revolution, renowned British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm focuses on the historical period from the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth. He concludes that the "dual revolutions" of the time-the French Revolution and the British Industrial Revolution-changed the way the whole world thought about politics and power, and fundamentally shaped the modern era.
This is the first in Hobsbawm's acclaimed trilogy of books on the "long" nineteenth century-from 1789 to 1914. In The Age of Revolution he explains how the dual revolutions created conditions in which capitalism and liberalism could rise and dominate. But while values such as liberty, free trade, and meritocracy led to the formation of the middle class, this leap forward largely excluded the urban, laboring poor, resulting in the emergence of socialism and the working class.
Although now over 50 years old, the text remains a superb introduction to modern history and has been read by millions worldwide.
audiobook
(3)
A Macat Analysis of Eugene D. Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made
by Cheryl Hudson
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
Published in 1974, Roll, Jordan, Roll is American historian Eugene Genovese's epic study of slavery in the United States in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It provides a nuanced understanding of the relationship between master and slave.
Slave owners saw it as their duty to limit slaves' freedoms for their own good, as a father might deal with his child. But Genovese looked beyond this notion of paternalism to suggest the relationship was more complex. Slaves did not simply accept their lot passively. They used sophisticated techniques to survive-an acceptance of some of the slave masters' demands combined with the ability to negotiate certain rights-all the while maintaining their own sense of humanity through song and prayer.
Genovese's uncovering of these relationships caused controversy, because he refused to make simplistic moral claims that slaveholders were "bad" and slaves were "good."
audiobook
(1)
A Macat Analysis of John C. Calhoun's A Disquisition on Government
by Etienne Stockland
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
Nineteenth century American politician John C. Calhoun was unashamedly pro-slavery. So it may seem odd that A Disquisition on Government (1850), written in part to protect that practice, is so respected today. But South Carolina-born Calhoun was undoubtedly a great political thinker.
Calhoun-who served his country as senator, vice president, secretary of war, and secretary of state-believed that "majority rule" inevitably led to abuse of power. He proposed the principle of the "concurrent majority," whereby minority groups would be able to veto central government legislation that worked against their interests. Calhoun believed this way politics would become more consensual, and the interests of minority groups would be protected.
The Disquisition became a rallying point for Southern statesmen and slave owners who claimed the federal government-dominated by Northern interests-ignored their rights. Ironically, the twentieth century saw civil rights activists and liberal thinkers latching on to Calhoun's vision of the "concurrent majority" and proposing it as a means of driving a fairer democratic system for all minorities, including African Americans.
audiobook
(0)
A Macat Analysis of Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the American Literary Imag
by Karina Jakubowicz
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
Morrison, an African American, draws attention to the often-overlooked significance of race in literature, demonstrating "the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it." She demonstrates that the quintessentially American literary themes of freedom and individualism depend on the existence of a black population that was manifestly not free.
Reading the racial language between the lines of classic American fiction, Morrison shows that literature is never raceless, and that the equating of whiteness with universality is the problematic element that literary studies has been overlooking. Morrison denounces a "color-blind" approach and asks that we open our eyes to the realities of race, representation, and power.
audiobook
(0)
A Macat Analysis of Elaine Tyler May's Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era
by Jarrod Homer
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
After World War II ended in 1945, the Soviet Union and the United States began a decades-long confrontation that would become known as the Cold War. American foreign policy focused on "containment"-preventing the communist USSR from gaining more ground-and many people looked at the geographical and political implications of this policy. Others, meanwhile, explored American domestic life in that same period. But historian Elaine Tyler May became the first person to bring these seemingly unrelated areas together. Piecing together evidence from a wide range of sources-data, surveys, examinations of leisure activities, and lifestyles as depicted by the media-1988's Homeward Bound draws a convincing picture of how US culture in the 1950s did the job of containing and constraining its own people, particularly women. This groundbreaking work debunks many of the ideas that have grown up about 1950s culture, and is still an important text nearly three decades after it was first published.
audiobook
(6)
A Macat Analysis of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and
by Tom Stammers
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
American author Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's 1996 work Hitler's Willing Executioners is one of the most controversial history books of modern times. While most historians have sought to explain the horror of the Holocaust by focusing on Nazi leaders and their ideologies, Goldhagen set out to investigate whether ordinary Germans enthusiastically embraced their goals. His conclusion: "eliminationist anti-Semitism"-a genocidal hatred of Jews unique to Germany-caused the Holocaust.
Hitler's Willing Executioners topped bestseller lists in Britain, Germany, and America, and won prestigious awards. But historians almost universally disagreed with Goldhagen's arguments, which ran counter to those of Christopher Browning in his 1992 book Ordinary Men. Browning examined members of a police unit who carried out acts of genocide and found that regular people acted out of fear and as a result of peer pressure. A ferocious historical dispute raged between partisans of the two authors. This "Goldhagen Controversy," as it became known, proved to be one of the most significant debates of the 1990s.
audiobook
(0)
A Macat Analysis of Chinua Achebe's An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"
by Clare Clarke
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
Nigerian novelist and professor Chinua Achebe was acutely conscious that Western views of Africa were inevitably the views of a culture that assumed itself superior. When confronted by what it took to be an inferior culture, the West identified itself as better-materially, intellectually, even spiritually. Achebe believed that even as original and subtle a work as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness-a novel seen by many as a criticism of colonialism and one that Achebe admired stylistically-reflected these assumptions.
For Achebe, Heart of Darkness was a book shot through with racist preconceptions that belittled and demeaned both Africa and Africans. As such it could never be considered a great work of art, as had consistently been claimed in the West. Achebe maintained that the novel's racism left it permanently tainted. This was a view that shocked, startled, stimulated, and colored all subsequent opinions of Conrad. It remains controversial and challenging-even divisive-today.
audiobook
(5)
A Macat Analysis of W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk
by Jason Xidias
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
Published by sociologist and historian W. E. B. Du Bois in 1903, this series of essays addresses the plight of African Americans facing everyday racism in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. It has become one of the most important works on race and identity across the world.
Du Bois sets out to explain how black interaction with a white world has caused psychological anguish and argues that blacks should demand total equality in their daily realities. He opposes the views of other black intellectuals that some inequality was acceptable in exchange for basic education and legal rights.
The Souls of Black Folk highlights the way Jim Crow Laws (designed above all to make it impossible for blacks to vote) kept blacks in conditions they thought they had escaped when slavery was abolished in 1865.
Looking at key issues from political, economic, and social perspectives, The Souls of Black Folk profoundly influenced the civil rights movement in the US and inspired post-colonial thinking worldwide.
audiobook
(1)
Hanna Batatu's "The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq"
A Macat Analysis
by Macat
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
First published in 1978, Batatu's extraordinarily detailed text is considered the definitive social history of twentieth century Iraq. The work is actually three volumes in one.
The first discusses the evolution of the social groups existing in Iraq at the beginning of the twentieth century. The second tells the story of the emerging communist movement through the 1950s. The third examines the 1958 revolution itself and the role of different social groups both before and after it occurred.
All three use both unique primary sources and detailed oral histories to examine the changing cultural, social, economic and political landscape that led to revolution.
audiobook
(1)
A Macat Analysis of David Brion Davis's The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823
by Duncan Money
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
Davis's 1975 work looks to answer a question that had been all but ignored up to that point. Slavery had been accepted in Western culture for centuries. So why did a movement suddenly rise up in the industrial era calling for the slave trade to be abolished? Could it be that people had suddenly become more enlightened and humanitarian? Or were there other, more compelling and perhaps self-interested reasons for this sudden about-turn?
The Problem of Slavery offers a thorough account of the emergence of the antislavery movement in Britain and the United States. But what makes the work unique is the way it explores and unpicks the complex relationships between changes in our understanding of what is moral, the impact of political action, and its effect on social change.
audiobook
(4)
A Macat Analysis of David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
by John Donaldson
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
David Hume's book tackling the subject of belief in God is among the most influential in Western philosophy. Published in 1779, three years after Hume's death, without featuring the author's name, the book was deeply controversial in its day. It is now considered a masterpiece and Hume is regarded as one of the greatest philosophers writing in English.
A cleverly crafted fictional conversation, Dialogues deals with justifying belief in God. On the one hand is the argument that a universe that looks designed must have a designer, and also the argument that the universe has what is known as an uncaused first cause, and that can only be God. On the other hand is the argument that if there is evil in the world, then there cannot be a God. Through these debates Hume weaves the question of whether we can truly know God's nature. Dialogues is an elegant exploration of Hume's empiricism, the theory that knowledge can only be built on what we experience through our senses. More than 200 years after the work was first published, Hume's beautifully shaped arguments are still in use among twenty-first-century philosophers.
audiobook
(0)
A Macat Analysis of Robert A. Dahl's Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City
by Astrid Norén-Nilsson
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City by American political theorist Robert A. Dahl was a game-changer when it was first published in 1961, and remains one of the most influential books ever written in the field of political science.
Here Dahl argues that American liberal democracy is a pluralist system in which policy is not, as you might think, shaped by a small group of powerful individuals. Rather, power is distributed among several competing groups, with each of these groups seeking to influence decisions.
Dahl provides evidence for this by making a case study of the decision-making process in New Haven, Connecticut, where only the mayor has power in all areas. The city's "highly competitive two-party system" leads Dahl to view the entire United States as New Haven writ large.
Who Governs? is a key text of pluralist democratic theory, the thinking that dominated the way America studied the notion of power in the late 1950s and 1960s.
audiobook
(1)
A Macat Analysis of Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch's Working Memory
by Birgit Koopmann-Holm
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
In the 1960s, researchers into human memory began to understand memory as operating under two systems. The first was a short-term system handling information for mere seconds. The second was a long-term system capable of managing information indefinitely. They also discovered, however, that short-term memory was not simply a filing cabinet, but was actively working on cognitive-or mental-tasks. This is how the phrase "working memory" developed.
Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch wanted to find evidence to prove that short-term memory really could be described as working memory. Their 1974 work presents the results of 10 original experiments and concludes that working memory actually consists of three parts. Two separate components-one handling what we hear, one handling what we see-act as our short-term information storage. The third component is responsible for processing and managing the first two, while also influencing attention, reasoning, reading comprehension, and learning.
Although evidence from recent experiments has led to some modifications to the Baddeley—Hitch working memory model, "Working Memory" was and still is a highly influential paper in memory research.
audiobook
(0)
A Macat Analysis of Milton Friedman's The Role of Monetary Policy
by John Collins
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
Milton Friedman's 1968 paper "The Role of Monetary Policy" changed the course of economic theory. In just 17 pages, Friedman outlined an effective government monetary policy designed to achieve the goals of broader economic strategy, namely "high employment, stable prices, and rapid growth."
Friedman did not just demonstrate that monetary policy plays a vital role in broader economic stability. He also argued that economists got their monetary policy wrong in the 1950s and 1960s by misunderstanding the relationship between inflation and unemployment. In Friedman's view, previous generations of economists had no justification for believing that governments could permanently decrease unemployment by allowing inflation-and vice versa. Friedman's most original contribution was to propose that this relationship between unemployment and inflation only worked in the short term.
The Economist magazine described Milton Friedman as "the most influential economist of the second half of the twentieth century ... possibly of all of it." And "The Role of Monetary Policy" remains highly influential.
audiobook
(0)
A Macat Analysis of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man
by Mariana Assis
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
British-born American political activist Thomas Paine wrote Rights of Man in 1791 in response to Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke's attack on the French Revolution. Burke was wary of tearing down old institutions of government. But Paine argued that revolution is acceptable-in fact, necessary-when government ignores the rights of its people. Not surprisingly, Rights of Man proved very popular in the newly liberated United States, selling over 100,000 copies. In England, though, Paine was convicted (in his absence) of writing to incite a popular uprising.
The 31 essays collected in Rights of Man argue passionately that people have the right to overthrow an illegitimate government. Drawing on notions of universal human rights and the advantages of representation, Paine also claims that citizens have the right to create new governments themselves.
Rights of Man has played a major part in shaping many of the freedoms and institutions we see today, and its influence has resonated for more than two centuries.
audiobook
(1)
A Macat Analysis of Jack A. Goldstone's Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World
by Etienne Stockland
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
American sociologist Jack A. Goldstone examines the causes of revolutions and uprisings in the period between 1500 and 1800. Investigating cases in both Europe and Asia, the conclusions he reaches are surprising. Many thinkers had previously believed that Europe's distinctive history-and particularly the rise of capitalism-had created the specific revolutions and political changes that launched the continent on a path to global supremacy. Goldstone says this is wrong, and that European and Asian states were, in fact, all experiencing similar developments; the reasons behind revolutions in both areas were surprisingly similar. It was how states reconstructed themselves in their aftermath that explained why Europe and Asia went on to develop differently.
Goldstone goes on to identify four factors that led to the collapse of central authority in Eurasia in the early modern period. These are as follows. Fiscal crises of one sort or another.
Rapid population growth.
Conflict between elites.
The potential for the masses to rise due to popular grievances.
Goldstone developed a novel formula called the "political stress indicator" (or "PSI") that turned fiscal stress, intra-elite conflict and the potential for mass mobilization into measurable variables. With this formula, the likelihood of past and present state failures could therefore be predicted.
audiobook
(1)
A Macat Analysis of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America
by Elizabeth Morrow
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840, challenged conventional thinking about democracy when it appeared-and is still cited by leading politicians today.
Having witnessed some negative effects of democratic revolutions in his native France, Tocqueville visited America in 1831 to see what a functioning republic looked like. His main concerns were that democracy could make people too dependent on the state and that minority voices might not be heard-a problem he termed "The Tyranny of the Majority." By examining America thoroughly, Tocqueville hoped to show how a democratic system could avoid these pitfalls.
Tocqueville also made a number of accurate predictions about the future of the United States, anticipating that the debate over abolishing slavery would cause conflict and that the US and Russia would emerge as the world's two great powers.
audiobook
(1)
A Macat Analysis of Søren Kierkegaard's The Sickness unto Death
by Shirin Shafaie
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
Søren Kierkegaard has long been considered the father of the philosophical movement known as Christian existentialism, which focuses on the living human being. In his major 1849 work, The Sickness Unto Death, he takes listeners on a journey from the human self, its spirit, despair, and sin, through to faith.
Kierkegaard championed the fact that the "single specific individual" was of most importance and never tired in his attempt to address the universal human concept of despair.
Anyone interested in the beginnings of the existential movement will want to explore Kierkegaard's radical and comprehensive analysis of human nature. In this seminal text, we see the origins of the existential movement in modern psychology, which has influenced a great number of social psychologists, cultural critics, and artists. Although Kierkegaard insisted that it was Christianity that was the sole cure for humanity's anxiety and despair, his work continues to be widely taught in universities across the world, including countries where other faith traditions dominate.
audiobook
(0)
A Macat Analysis of the Brundtland Report: Our Common Future
by Ksenia Gerasimova
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
Our Common Future, also known as The Brundtland Report, is a joint work produced in 1987 by a United Nations commission headed by former Norwegian prime minister, Gro Brundtland. Intended to respond to a growing number of environmental concerns faced by the global community, it recognized the need for long-term strategies to manage natural resources. It says we must act collaboratively to protect the environment, while at the same time stimulating economic and social development. These goals are summarized as "sustainable development," defined in the report as humanity's ability "to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." The report argues that human development and the environment are deeply linked and have to be looked at together. This requires international collaboration and greater awareness among the general public.
audiobook
(1)
A Macat Analysis of Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic
by Simon Young
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
"There are many works of history that are revered, but few that are loved as Religion and the Decline of Magic is." So says award-winning author of Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel, of historian Keith Thomas's 1971 book. Religion and the Decline of Magic examines popular belief in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, a key period during which leaders of the Protestant Reformation tried to disentangle magic from religion itself. Thomas argues that magic was popular because it offered practical solutions to everyday problems.
Few social historians had examined the popular religious beliefs of the 1500s at the time Thomas wrote Religion. His analysis of that period allowed him to claim that social history can answer important questions about changing mentalities.
More than 40 years after its publication, Religion and the Decline of Magic remains one of the great works of post-war scholarship.
audiobook
(3)
A Macat Analysis of Sun Tzu's The Art of War
by Ramon Pacheco Pardo
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
One of the most important military strategy books ever published, Chinese general Sun Tzu's The Art of War has also been used as a manual for modern business, giving executives an insight into the vital importance of tactics and preparation.
Written more than 2,500 years ago, this earliest surviving work on how to wage war successfully-and above all, rationally-argues that winning requires careful advance planning, better sources of information than your opponent, and a strategy that's flexible enough to adapt to changing conditions. Sun Tzu concludes that in the end a decision not to take military action can be every bit as sensible and effective as being able to triumph on the battlefield. The very best way to win a war is, in fact, to achieve your aims without having to fight at all.
Written in China around the sixth century b.c., The Art of War continues to inspire military planners worldwide, but also people who want to succeed in the fields of business, law, and management.
audiobook
(0)
Chris Argyris's "The Individual and the Organisation: Some Problems of Mutual Adjustment"
A Macat Analysis
by Chris Argyris
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
Argyris' "The Individual and 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 argument in studies on human nature, Argyris highlights that demands of greater independence, an expansion of interests, and re-orientation of goals usually accompany maturation, which is at odds with higher control stemming from formal organisations. This frustration, he contends, is detrimental to productivity, increases the chance of failure and causes conflict.
audiobook
(1)
A Macat Analysis of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
by Ruth Scobie
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
Philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a key text in the development of what we now know as feminism.
Written in the atmosphere created by the French Revolution, which made radical change seem possible, Wollstonecraft's work challenges the idea that society's oppression of women is entirely natural. While her male contemporaries happily argued for the fundamental freedoms of all men, few were interested in extending these revolutionary rights to women. Infuriated that women should be educated only to serve men, Wollstonecraft asserts that the differences between male and female behavior are the result of nurture, not nature. She outlines a theory for the equal education of girls and boys, and argues that women should no longer be taught only the "feminine" things that men believe make them better wives and mothers.
Written more than 200 years ago, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman sets out all the basic principles of feminist thought that would be developed by later feminist writers and activists.
audiobook
(5)
A Macat Analysis of Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth
by Riley Quinn
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
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 just from the countries themselves, but from the very souls of their inhabitants, who have been so damaged by its abuses.
According to Fanon, it is the poor above all who need to rebel if real change is to come, because the indigenous middle classes will just produce a society very similar to the old one. And after revolution, the new country should aspire to make real improvements in the lives of the worst off through education and investment.
The Wretched of the Earth became an inspiration for many liberation struggles around the world after Fanon's death and continues to be a key text in postcolonial studies.
audiobook
(1)
Lucien Febvre's "The Problem of Unbelief in the 16th Century"
A Macat Analysis
by Macat
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
What is the past — and what can we really know about it? This is the big question Febvre explores in this 1942 text. Relying on his groundbreaking technique championing 'problem-based history,' Febvre focuses on sixteenth-century French writer François Rabelais to answer one controversial question: Was Rabelais really one of France's first atheists?
Febvre conducted thorough research on Rabelais and the times he lived in to challenge this accepted view. He studied the mindsets of the day and concluded that Rabelais was not — indeed could not have been— a non-believer because it would have been impossible for a man to conceive of a world without God in that time and place.
audiobook
(0)
A Macat Analysis of Georges Lefebvre's The Coming of the French Revolution
by Tom Stammers
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
Georges Lefebvre's 1939 work The Coming of the French Revolution documents the collapse of the social order-and the monarchy-in France during the fateful year of 1789.
Based around a Marxist understanding of class struggle, Lefebvre sees the revolution not just as a political crisis, but also as an assault on inherited privilege and the social hierarchy. Ultimately it succeeded because people at every level of society-from nobles and the elite bourgeois to peasants and the urban masses-found the will to defy the crown.
Lefebvre's book was later interpreted by some as simplistic and overly partisan, designed as a rallying call to his fellow countrymen to defend France's republican political system just as World War II was breaking out. Yet The Coming of The French Revolution is still important for anyone who wants to understand how historical analysis of the French Revolution evolved in the second half of the twentieth century.
audiobook
(4)
A Macat Analysis of David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
by Michael O'Sullivan
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
Excited by the possibilities hinted at by the major scientific breakthroughs of the day, Scottish philosopher David Hume set out to construct a science of the mind. 1748's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is the result.
A work that had a huge influence on great thinkers including celebrated German philosopher Immanuel Kant, An Enquiry is Hume's examination of how we obtain information and form beliefs. He argues that we mainly gain knowledge through our senses, a theory known as empiricism. But while the impressions from our senses are key to our beliefs about the world, Hume argues that reason and facts play only a limited part.
His thinking here led him to dangerous places. His conclusion that many religious beliefs of the time could therefore not be justified was viewed with great suspicion during his lifetime. Yet An Enquiry is now widely considered one of the greatest works of Western philosophy, and Hume one of its key thinkers.
audiobook
(0)
A Macat Analysis of Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
by Joshua Specht
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
Before Bernard Bailyn published The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution in 1967, it was generally believed that the Revolution was driven both by social conflict between colonial settlers and the ruling British government, and by differences between classes in American society. Bailyn had a different view. He said that it was radical ideas that fired the American Revolution, and that the Revolution was above all else an ideological, constitutional, and political struggle.
Bailyn showed how American colonists were moved by a strain of radical anti-authoritarian thought that cherished individual liberty and distrusted centralized power. In Bailyn's view, revolutionaries in the colonies felt their own oppression was part of a greater whole, part of "a comprehensive conspiracy against liberty throughout the English-speaking world-a conspiracy believed to have been nourished in corruption."
Considered one of the most influential twentieth-century works on the American Revolution, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution won Bailyn the first of two Pulitzer Prizes. He was also awarded the Bancroft Prize for the work-the highest honor an American history book can receive.
audiobook
(1)
A Macat Analysis of Alfred W. Crosby's The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequenc
by Joshua Specht
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
Environmental factors shape our history just as much as-and sometimes more than-human factors. That's the premise of Alfred W. Crosby's 1972 work The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, a key text in environmental history. While earlier scholars emphasized cultural and technological factors as defining the way our world developed, Crosby argues that nonhuman factors, such as the exchange of plants, animals, and microbes between the Old and New Worlds had more overall impact. "The most important changes brought on by the Columbian voyages were biological in nature," he says.
Crosby was one of the first historians to look at the importance of the spread of certain food crops and diseases in relation to the development of history, to show it was not simply political and social issues that counted. The Columbian Exchange introduces the idea that current human societies are also the product of a wider set of biological relationships, and need to be understood in these contexts.
audiobook
(3)
A Macat Analysis of Janet L. Abu-Lughod's Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350
by William R. Day Jr.
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
In the century before the Black Death swept across the world, economic relations flourished between Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, interacting on essentially equal terms. Before European Hegemony uses a wide-ranging geographical analysis to examine the fall of this thriving global economy built around interlocking sub-systems with the major world cities and towns playing a crucial role. As economic activity spread across borders, so did the Black Death. In the East, its catastrophic impact was exacerbated by the disintegration of the Mongol Empire and the collapse of the Asia-wide trading system, enabling the West to rise from the ruins and dominate the modern capitalist world-system.
One of the most important texts available on what is known as world-systems analysis, Before European Hegemony offers a window into global economics as far back as the mid-thirteenth century. Abu-Lughod's balanced approach and wide-ranging geographical analysis describes a thriving, multi-centered system brought down by unexpected forces.
audiobook
(1)
A Macat Analysis of John W. Dower's War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War
by Vincent Sanchez
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
In his 1986 book War Without Mercy, American historian John Dower examines Japanese-American relations during World War II and investigates links between popular culture, stereotypes, and extreme violence. He argues that it was the concept of racism-used equally by both sides-that underpinned the military conflict and led to a particularly brutal war in the Pacific and East Asia.
Racial stereotypes were deliberately transmitted through mass media and government propaganda on both sides, transforming enemy forces into subhuman characters that deserved to be dominated. Fueling such fear and loathing of the "inferior other" created a certain mindset among American and Japanese soldiers that saw them focusing on the utter destruction of an enemy believed to be beasts and vermin.
Dower argues that after hostilities cease, these racial stereotypes do not disappear, but are re-used to describe whichever new enemy emerges.
War Without Mercy has won several prizes, including the US National Book Critics Circle Award, and Dower remains one of the most important contemporary scholars on Japanese-American relations.
audiobook
(1)
A Macat Analysis of Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive
by Rodolfo Maggio
read by Macat.com
Part of the Macat Library series
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 Guinea over the past 7,000 years, and Japan in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, managed to overcome potentially terminal challenges to their survival. Investigating these successes and failures allows Diamond to pinpoint the five key factors.
Collapse alienated many academics, especially those who objected to Diamond's emphasis on "geographic determinism," or the impact of local environments on the way societies develop. Many of them dismissed this view as outdated and racist. But Diamond's depth of knowledge and the way he uses it so engagingly have won Collapse a huge worldwide readership.