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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...
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More than 200 years after Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, governments around the world continue to address many of the issues discussed in the book. The most powerful states in the world are still committed to international trade, but questions are repeatedly asked about the role of governments in the economy and the effectiveness of the free market.
Smith wanted to show that mercantilism-the dominant economic theory of his time-was wrong....
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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...
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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...
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First published in 1973, Albert Bandura's Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis is a groundbreaking work that helped lay the foundations of the discipline of social psychology. Much of what we now know about the influences of the early childhood environment on delinquency and anti-social behavior can be traced back to Bandura's work. In the book, he uses the subject of aggression to demonstrate and explore the usefulness of what is called social...
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Albert Hourani's 1991 work, A History of the Arab Peoples, is unsurpassed as an overview of Arab history, from the rise of Islam to the late twentieth century. Going far beyond the political history that had generally characterized previous examinations, Hourani integrates a wide range of scholarship to provide a deep analysis of social, cultural, and economic structures. His interest in the everyday lives of Arab people and his desire to understand...
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One of the most influential works of political theory ever written, The Federalist Papers collects 85 essays from 1787 and 1788, when the United States was a new country looking to find its way politically. Thomas Jefferson, author of the country's Declaration of Independence and a future US president himself, called the work "the best commentary on the principles of government which ever was written."
The Federalist Papers looked to persuade Americans...
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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...
9) A Macat Analysis of Alfred W. Crosby's The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequenc
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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...
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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...
11) A Macat Analysis of Amos Tversky, and Daniel Kahneman's Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics an
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Published in 1974 in the journal Science, the article "Judgment under Uncertainty" had a profound impact across the social sciences. Two relatively young Israeli psychologists were challenging the leading ideas about human thought. For decades, social scientists had used a mythical figure to describe how humans make decisions: homo economicus. Homo economicus was logical and conscientious. To make a decision, he would evaluate all the options open...
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First published in 1948, Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks is an important Marxist work that says we must understand societies both in terms of their economic relationships and their cultural beliefs.
Gramsci wanted to explore why Russia had undergone a socialist revolution in 1917 while other European countries had not. So he developed the concept of hegemony, which is the idea that those who hold power in a society can maintain and use that power...
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How many books can claim to be so influential as to inspire the development of a whole school of thought? The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle's Metaphysics did exactly that, laying the foundations for a new branch of philosophy-metaphysics-concerned with the cause and nature of being.
Aristotle questioned his teacher Plato's renowned Theory of Forms. Plato argued that everything in the world is nothing more than an imperfect representation of...
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Aristotle wrote Nicomachean Ethics in Greece in the fourth century b.c.e., a period of extraordinary all-round intellectual development. He was a student of Plato, who in turn was a student of Socrates. Aristotle went on to teach the warrior and empire builder, Alexander the Great. More than two millennia later, Aristotle's thorough exploration of virtue, reason, and the ultimate human good still forms the basis of the values that lie at the heart...
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Politics is one of the first books ever to investigate the concept of political philosophy. Written by the famous Greek thinker Aristotle in the fourth century b.c., it focuses on trying to understand how best to create political communities that support, serve, and improve their citizens.
Aristotle investigates a number of different areas before drawing conclusions. These include an examination of existing regimes to see which are best, a look at...
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Published in 1996, Arjun Appadurai's Modernity at Large is an edited collection of earlier essays that had already made the Indian-born anthropologist an influential figure in his field of cultural anthropology. Appadurai here presents a theory of globalization, and suggests ways that other researchers can follow up on his ideas. Many of them continue to do so. For anthropologists, the book offered new ways of thinking about how communities are affected...
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Originally written as 13 individual books around 397 b.c., Augustine of Hippo's Confessions is one of the most referenced works in the Western literary tradition. Augustine lived from 354—430 b.c., and the work is in part an autobiography. But it also tells us much about the period in which he lived. The first nine books draw a compelling narrative of the first 43 years of Augustine's life, which were spent in North Africa and Italy. In the tenth...
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Some people think nationhood is as old as civilization itself. But for anthropologist, historian, and political scientist Benedict Anderson, nation and nationalism are products of the communication technology of the era known as the modern age, which began in 1500. After the invention of the printing press in around 1440, common local languages gradually replaced Latin as the language of print. Ordinary people could now share ideas of their own. Later,...
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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,...
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Born in 1921, Betty Friedan was an American psychology graduate, political activist, journalist, wife, and mother, who challenged the vision 1950s America had of itself as a nation of happy housewives in contented families.
In 1963's The Feminine Mystique, she identified "the problem that has no name" afflicting women pressured to devote themselves to domestic life. After World War II, society fostered the idea that women wanted different things...
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