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Edited and produced from the lecture notes of his students at the University of Geneva, the Course in General Linguistics was first published in 1916, three years after its author's death. The book sets out Saussure's theory that all languages share the same underlying structure, regardless of historical or cultural context.

Recognizing that companies went bust when the market for their products dried up, Levitt set out to learn why. The manifesto he produced aimed to upend conventional wisdom that viewed a company's product as paramount.

Dikotter's 2010 masterpiece catalogues the tragedy and the cover-up of the hideous famine caused by the Great Leap Forward-Mao Zedong's disastrous attempt to jumpstart industrialization in China in the late 1950s.

Published in 1994, The Bell Curve caused uproar. Herrnstein and Murray claim that intelligence is the key factor in determining success in life and that it is genetic and, more controversially still, that some ethnic groups are more intelligent than others.

Philip Zimbardo is fascinated by why people can behave in awful ways. uSome psychologists believe those who commit cruelty are innately evil. Zimbardo disagrees.

Lewis's 1952 Mere Christianity-originally printed in pamphlet form during World War II-documents a complex journey from atheism to faith. Lewis's fresh, lively, and often humorous presentation of Christian doctrine helped to make him arguably the greatest defender of Christianity of the 20th century.

Carson's 1962 work Silent Spring was one of the first books ever to highlight environmentalist issues. Focusing on the negative, widespread, and long-lasting effects of human activity on the environment-particularly through the use of chemical pesticides in agriculture-Carson argued that we are all morally obliged to look after the environment.

"Black Skin, White Masks offers a radical analysis of the psychological effects of colonization on the colonized. Fanon witnessed the effects of colonization first hand both in his birthplace, Martinique, and again later in life when he worked as a psychiatrist in another French colony, Algeria.

Few works of scholarship have so comprehensively recast an existing debate as Chinua Achebe's essay on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

Maslow's 1943 essay established his idea of humanistic psychology as a "third force" in the field. While psychoanalysts sought to understand behaviour by uncovering subconscious desires and behaviourists through analysis of conditioned behaviours.

Sen's 1997 work argues that the success or failure of international development cannot be measured by income alone. Having grown up in India, Sen brings his own understanding of poverty to the issue, arguing that the end goal of development must be human freedom.

Originally published in 1866, Civil Disobedience asks when - and in what circumstances - an individual should actively oppose government and its justice system. Thoreau's argument is that opposition is legitimate whenever government actions or institutions are unacceptable to an individual's conscience.

200 years after it was written, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations is still debated by governments internationally. Smith argued that 'mercantilism'-the theory that the national economy exists solely to strengthen the government, thus the government should regulate the economy-was wrong.

William worked on The Principles of Psychology throughout the 1880s, while teaching psychology and philosophy at Harvard University.

An important Marxist work, Prison Notebooks (1948) argues that we must understand societies both in terms of their economic relationships and their cultural beliefs.

Before the publication of Nature's Metropolis in 1991, historians generally treated urban and rural areas as distinct from one another, following separate lines of development and maturity.

What is justice? How should an individual and a society behave justly? And how do they learn how to do so? These are just some of the core questions explored in The Republic, considered by many to be Plato's most important work.

Classical economics suggests that market economies are self-correcting in times of recession or depression, and tend toward full employment and output. But English economist John Maynard Keynes disagrees. In his ground-breaking 1936 study The General Theory, Keynes argues that traditional economics has misunderstood the causes of unemployment.

With the ending of World War II in 1945, the Soviet Union and the United States began the decades-long confrontation 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.

Hoffer began writing The True Believer in the 1940s, as Nazism and fascism spread across Europe. Most analysts studying how these movements became so powerful focused on their leaders and the ideas they trumpeted. Hoffer focused on the followers. He saw that people joining mass movements all had common traits.

Slavery had been accepted in Western culture for centuries. So why did a movement suddenly rise up in the industrial era calling for its abolition? Could it be that people had suddenly become more enlightened and humanitarian? Or were there other, more compelling and perhaps self-serving reasons for this sudden about-turn?

In His book Gender and the Politics of History (1998), Scott draws attention to the fact that despite gender equality's long-term recognition there has been no genuinely revolutionary change unlike economic, social, and class inequalities.

Postmodernist thinkers consider history to be not very far removed from a work of fiction, something dependent on historians' own interpretations of the past. Evans, however, argues that we can trust history and it is possible to be objective about what happened and what caused it to happen.

The United States has the world's largest prison population, with more than two million behind bars. Alexander says this is mainly due to America's 'war on drugs,' launched in 1982. In The New Jim Crow, she explains how this government initiative has led to America's black citizens being imprisoned on a colossal scale.

Roll Jordan Roll (1974) is a study of the relationship between master and slave in the United States in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Genovese looks beyond the idea of paternalism-where owners limited slaves' freedoms for their own good-suggesting the relationship was more complex.

Like Foucault's earlier works, The History of Sexuality (1976) is ground-breaking and controversial. His claim that sexuality is more a social concept than the product of biological instincts challenges the accepted idea that it was the rise of modernity and capitalism that resulted in repression of sexualities.