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Neurologist Oliver Sacks' 1985 book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat challenges the impersonal approach doctors took to patient care and paved the way for a new literary genre: popular science. At the time of its publication, neurologists and physicians relied mainly on clinical studies and their own expertise to set the course of treatment. Sacks found this inhumane and developed a very different approach, clearly demonstrated in The Man Who Mistook His Wife.

Issues of human rights and freedoms always inflame passions, and John Rawls's A Theory of Justice will do the same. Published in 1971, it links the idea of social justice to a basic sense of fairness that recognizes human rights and freedoms. Controversially, though, it also accepts differences in the distribution of goods and services - as long as they benefit the worst off in society.

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.

David Graeber's 2011 book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, seeks to overturn hundreds of years of economic theory, specifically the idea that people have a natural inclination to trade with each other and that the concept of money developed spontaneously to overcome the inefficiencies of a bartering system. The US-born social activist uses his training as an anthropologist to trace the histories of money and of debt and reaches the conclusion that money was in fact created by the state as a means of exploiting the poor.

Michel Foucault had already written extensively about medicine, madness, and prisons. But in the latter days of his career, he turned to the subject of sexuality, planning six volumes on the subject. He completed three before dying of an AIDS-related illness in 1984. Foucault's History of Sexuality Vol. 1 is a study of the evolution of cultural ideas about sex in the West since the end of the 17th century. Volume two looked at attitudes toward sex in ancient Greece; volume three investigated sex in ancient Rome.

Advertisements for soap. The image of a film star. The sight of a car as beautiful as a goddess. We accept all these common objects and experiences as normal parts of our lives and as timeless and universal as myth. But they are also carrying hidden messages that none of us even suspect, as Barthes demonstrates with a unique analysis of the signs that generate meanings and assumptions we all take for granted. These things have been "taken out of history" so that their hidden cultural meanings can be accepted without question.

Austrian-born economist Friedrich Hayek's 1944 work, The Road to Serfdom, analyzes the ways in which excessive government planning can erode democracy. Published while World War II still raged, the work draws influential parallels between the totalitarianism of both socialism and Nazism and increasing control exerted by Western democracies.

Since the 19th century, people have claimed that the prosperity enjoyed by the First World was the result of its devotion to unconstrained economic freedoms. In his 2003 book Kicking Away the Ladder, South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang claims this was not the case and that, in fact, First World economic success was due to exactly the kinds of state intervention that traditional economic thinking consistently opposes today.

Why do we want to justify our decisions, even if they appear to be irrational? The answer lies in cognitive dissonance, the mental discomfort we experience when we hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time. In A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, first published in 1957, American social psychologist Leon Festinger investigates the problem. Festinger puts forward the idea that we have developed mechanisms to try to deal with the stress brought on by cognitive dissonance.

Morgenthau's classic text, published in 1948, not only introduced the concept of political realism but also established it as the dominant approach in international relations and the guiding philosophy of US foreign policy during the Cold War.

Kenneth Waltz's Theory of International Politics created a "scientific revolution" in international relations, starting two major debates. In the 1980s it defined the controversy between the neorealists, who believed that competition between states was inevitable, and the neoliberals, who believed that states could cooperate with each other. As the debate wound down with the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, a second more fundamental debate began.

Since it was first published in 1973, A Random Walk Down Wall Street has been a highly influential best seller. Burton G. Malkiel demolishes the idea that investment "experts" can predict stock price changes and thereby "beat the market." With all available information that could affect the value of a company's shares known almost instantly to all investors, Malkiel says, shares quickly find the price that reflects that information. This is known as the efficient market hypothesis.

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 because of their own grip on cultural values and economic relationships.

Published in 1925, The Gift is one of French sociologist Marcel Mauss's few non-collaborative works. In it, he elevates what might appear to be a simple gift from the status of innocent object to something that has the capacity to motivate people and define social relationships. The Gift analyzes cultures across the world and across time, with the way gifts are given and received working as a guide to understanding the rules and traditions of many different societies.

Gordon W. Allport's 1954 book The Nature of Prejudice helped mold the ways in which psychologists investigate prejudice. But the American's work reached further than that, also helping to shape society as a whole and making a substantial contribution to the US Civil Rights Movement, as well as to the country's anti-discrimination and anti-segregation laws of the 1950s and 1960s.

While previous scholars of international history had focused on "great men" and their achievements, Paul Kennedy focused on the interdependent relationship between military might and economic growth. In his 1987 work, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, he shows why countries that balance the economic and the military can become "great powers." Those that fail to do so, however, risk imperial overstretch and failure.

Anthropologist Geert Hofstede's 1980 work, Culture's Consequences, was the first study to look at cultural differences using data. The Dutchman took advantage of the enormous global span of his employer, the technology company IBM, to gather survey data in 20 languages and across 70 countries, and to produce a unique study of national values.

In her 1958 work, political theorist Hannah Arendt asks two fundamental questions: "Under what conditions do politics emerge?" and "Under what conditions can politics be eliminated?" In searching for answers she turns some long-established thinking on its head. Ancient political philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle believed that a life spent thinking was more important than an active life of labor, work, and action. But Arendt argues that political action is every bit as important as political thinking.

Traditionally, managers assumed people were lazy and would not work unless strictly controlled. McGregor, however, believed this form of management to be based on faulty assumptions about human nature, and felt that managers should reflect on their assumptions about what motivates people. He proposed they draw on research in psychology and the other social sciences to create working conditions that allow all employees to realize their full human potential.

In his 1996 book The Clash Of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, American political scientist Samuel Huntington sets out his vision of the post-Cold War world. While the era from 1945 to 1989 was shaped by ideological conflict (communism vs. capitalism), Huntington predicts a future of cultural conflict.