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More than two centuries after its initial publication in 1781, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason remains perhaps the most influential text in modern philosophy. Kant wanted metaphysicians to move away from their endless battles about whether or not human knowledge must conform to independently given objects.

What is the nature of our personal relationship with God? That's the core question of Fear and Trembling, published in 1843. If God asks us to do something we instinctively feel is unethical, must we obey and have faith that He knows best?

More than a classic work on the history and philosophy of science, Kuhn's 1962 book is considered by many to be one of the greatest works of the 20th century. Kuhn helped change the way everyone looks at science.

In his ground-breaking 1936 study The General Theory, Keynes argues that traditional economics has misunderstood the causes of unemployment. Employment is not determined by the price of labor; it is directly linked to demand. Keynes believes market economies are by nature unstable, and so require government intervention.

"In his highly influential 1996 book, Huntington offers a vision of a post-Cold War world in which conflict takes place not between competing ideologies but between cultures.

Winner of the 1998 Pulitzer, Guns, Germs, and Steel attempts to answer why human history unfolded differently on different continents. 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 little to do with genetic superiority.

Tony Judt was born in London in 1948, but spent most of his career in America. He studied history at Cambridge and then earned his doctorate in France. His first major writings were about France's historical left-wing movements, particularly the French Socialist Party.

Do people always act rationally and in their own best interests? Thaler and Sunstein do not believe so. They are convinced that psychological factors often stop people from making the best decisions.

When Manias, Panics, and Crashes was published (1978), the world was entering a new period of global economic turbulence. Economists based their analyses on the assumption that investors act rationally and often communicated their ideas with dry, technical language.

Liquidated uses ethnographic research, traditionally used to study distant societies, to dissect the culture of high finance on New York's famous Wall Street.

Lovelock wrote Gaia for the general public, not for scientists. But there is a lot of science in this 1979 work. Lovelock suggests that the Earth is a superorganism, made up of all living things, interacting with the air, the oceans, and the surface rocks of the planet.

Sheila Fitzpatrick's Everyday Stalinism rejects the simplistic treatment of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian government that tightly controlled its citizens.

Why We Can't Wait (1964) is arguably the most vital book by one of the most important men in US history. Martin Luther King Jr. sets out the ideas that fuelled a large part of the 1960s civil rights movement.

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.

David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd explores the links between social character-the ways in which members of a society are similar to one another-and social structures. He argues that as the United States became predominantly consumer-driven, rather than production-driven-particularly after World War II-American social character changed.

Douglas McGregor's 1960 book is a vital study of the conditions that make employment satisfying and meaningful. Traditionally, managers assumed people were lazy and would not work unless strictly controlled. McGregor believed this was a faulty view of human nature.

Stephen Pinker's optimistic 2011 book argues that, despite humanity's biological tendency toward violence, we are, in fact, less violent today than ever before citing extensive statistical evidence.

The story of the crusades has been told and retold in Western histories-but invariable from Western perspectives. Carole Hillenbrand's fresh interpretation drew on Islamic sources that describe the crusades from a Muslim point of view.

Riley-Smith's 1986 book gives convincing case for a 'revisionist' view of the crusades, challenging the common belief that the crusades were motivated by fanaticism and were designed to plunder the Holy Lands.

Before Browning's 1992 book, most Holocaust scholarship focused either on the experience of the victims or on the Nazi political ideology driving the slaughter. He in stead investigates the men who carried out acts of extreme violence. Who were they? How could they end up committing such unspeakable acts?

Competitors have always existed in business, but what if it were possible to render your competition irrelevant? This is the critical question posed in Blue Ocean Strategy, which argues that the path to success of any company lies not in taking on potential competitors, but in the creation of "blue oceans" in uncontested market space.

The modern world has been marked by social revolutions that have transformed the states where they occurred. Theda Skocpol examines three of these uprisings-the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions-to consider the forces that make such dramatic upheaval possible.

Westad's seminal 2005 work shifts the focus of Cold War studies from Europe to the post-World War II interventions by both the Soviet Union and the United States in the affairs of developing nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

The Anti-Politics Machine (1990) examines how international development projects are conceived, researched, and put into practice. It also looks at what these projects actually achieve.

In Citizen and Subject, Mahmood Mamdani challenges dominant views of the crisis of postcolonial Africa, particularly that the problems the continent faces are home grown. Citizen and Subject insists that the current crisis is the institutional legacy of colonialism.

In their 1990 work, Gottfredson and Hirschi introduce a new and comprehensive theory of crime. At the time, crime researchers tended to focus on environmental factors that led to crime, not on the criminals themselves, and were inclined to think about crime only from their particular academic perspective.

Elizabeth Loftus' 1979 work explains why people sometimes remember events inaccurately and how this simple fact has a profound impact on the criminal justice system, especially given the value placed on eyewitness accounts. Although, as these are based on memories that are not always reliable.

War Without Mercy examines Japanese-American relations during World War II and investigates links between popular culture, stereotypes, and extreme violence. Dower argues that the concept of racism-used equally by both sides-underpinned the military conflict and led to a particularly brutal war in the Pacific and East Asia.

Goldstone examines the causes of revolutions and uprisings between 1500 and 1800 in both Europe and Asia. Many thinkers previously believed that Europe's distinctive history-particularly the rise of capitalism-had created the revolutions that launched its path to global supremacy.