International Education

London-born, Cambridge-trained historian Tony Judt explains how postwar European history reflects the drawn-out consequences of World War II - beginning with Nazi Germany's surrender in 1945 and ending with the collapse of the Soviet Union (1989-91). No historian before had written in such detail about recent European history, using those two events as bookends. Nor had anyone gone to such lengths to argue that Eastern and Western Europe - large nations and small - had a key characteristic in common.

African American novelist, anthropologist, and essayist Zora Neale Hurston explains how expression in African American arts and culture in the early 20th century departed from the art of white America. Using material collected on anthropological expeditions to the South, Hurston describes a creative process that is alive, ever changing, and largely improvisational. At the time African American art was often criticized for being unoriginal and for copying white culture.

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.

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 20th-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 many contemporary theories of morals.

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.

Elizabeth Loftus's 1979 work, Eyewitness Testimony, explains why people sometimes remember events inaccurately, and how this simple fact has a profound impact on the criminal justice system. Eyewitness accounts, which are often used in criminal trials, can be very persuasive to both judges and juries. Yet these accounts are based on memories that are not always reliable, meaning that suspects may be misidentified or wrongfully convicted.

Liebe ist etwas Kostbares und Einzigartiges. Wahre Liebe ist nicht die Liebe zu Menschen oder zu Objekten, sie liegt tiefer...

Famous as an accomplished poet, T. S. Eliot was also the author of some highly important literary criticism. First published in 1920, The Sacred Wood collects 13 of Eliot's early critical essays. He intended them to be a statement of his principles for literary achievement. These concepts - and the works that Eliot wrote after setting out his principles - inspired many major poets of the twentieth century. Some wanted to imitate him, while many others looked to disagree with him.

Seventeenth-century French writer René Descartes, one of the fathers of philosophy, imagined the mind and body as two separate entities that combine to form a human being. This concept came to be called "mind-body dualism." Ryle set about ridiculing Descartes's idea of, as he put it, a "ghost in the machine" stating that it was "entirely false, and false not in detail but in principle...not merely an assemblage of particular mistakes. It is one big mistake and a mistake of a special kind."

Do people always act rationally and in their own best interests? US economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein did not believe so, and were convinced that psychological factors often stopped people from making the best decisions. Their 2008 work Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness argues that governments should "nudge" citizens to make better choices in all sorts of areas, from eating habits, to health, to financial planning.

Its arguments would go on to shape global economics and influence world leaders in the late 20th century, but Capitalism and Freedom was largely ignored when it was first published in 1962. The first work written for the general public by American economist Milton Friedman, the book argues that a free market with little government interference is the best way to run society.

"Common Sense" was published in 1776, at a time when America, then a colony of Great Britain, was teetering on the brink of war. It was an immediate success, a best seller, and was credited with galvanizing the people of America and George Washington's army. Paine's approach followed a path blazed by earlier thinkers such as John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, though he radicalized both their positions. For Paine, British rule in America amounted to little more than tyranny.

A winner of the 1992 Bancroft Prize, Nature's Metropolis broke new ground in the burgeoning field of environmental history, while also adding weight to both urban and Western history. Before its publication in 1991, historians generally treated urban and rural areas as distinct from one another, each following separate lines of development and maturity. Using Chicago and its surrounding areas as a model, Cronon's book looks to disprove this idea.

In Philosophical Investigations, the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein presents a radical approach to problems in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. In fact, he sets out a radically new conception of philosophy itself. Published in 1953, two years after Wittgenstein's death, many still consider it one of the finest works of 20th century philosophy.

History of the Peloponnesian War was the first major work of political inquiry that did not relate events to divine influences. It introduced instead a critical method of looking to the facts of human actions as the basis of our understanding - a method that continues to be used today, more than two millennia later. Many of the most important political thinkers in the Western tradition cite Thucydides as an influence, and major figures including Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and Friedrich Nietzsche have praised his writing.

Geneva-born thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau's famous work of political philosophy from 1762 is based on a give-and-take theory of the relation between individual freedom and social order: the social contract that gives the work its name. Rousseau thinks about the issue by starting with what is known as the state of nature, a lawless condition where people are free to do what they like, governed only by their own instinctive sense of justice. People are free, but they are also vulnerable to chaos.

More than two centuries after its initial publication in 1781, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason remains perhaps the most influential text in modern philosophy. Kant himself claimed his work as a revolutionary document and insisted that it changed the discipline of philosophy as thoroughly as Copernicus had changed astronomy 300 years earlier, when he said the Earth revolved around the sun and not the other way round.

In Citizen and Subject, Ugandan academic and author Mahmood Mamdani challenges dominant views about the crisis of postcolonial Africa. Many studies emphasize that the problems the continent faces are homegrown - the consequence of poor government, widespread corruption, and other local factors. Citizen and Subject challenged these ideas. It argues that the current crisis has come about because of the institutional legacy of colonialism.

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.

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. He 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.