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First published in Germany in 1980, British historian Ian Kershaw's The "Hitler Myth" is recognized as one of the most important books ever written about Adolf Hitler and the Nazi State. Kershaw wanted to focus on what he called the "history of everyday life", and so investigated the attitude of the German public to Hitler at the time, rather than looking at the dictator from the perspective of those in positions of power. He was intrigued to find out how someone like Hitler could have become such a powerful figure.

Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics was first published in 1916, three years after his death. The book aims to explain Saussure's theory that all languages share an underlying structure, and that this underlying structure is the same, regardless of historical or cultural context. Although the book marked a break with the traditional, history-focused study of linguistics of the time, Saussure still uses examples based on more traditional studies.

In his 1807 work Phenomenology of Spirit, G. W. F. Hegel introduced the world to his philosophical system. His most influential work - and the culmination of the German Idealist movement begun in the late 18th century as a response to the works of Immanuel Kant - the book remains one of the undisputed classics of Western thought.

A self-educated man, Eric Hoffer was most likely born in 1898. He wrote in his spare time after doing shifts on the San Francisco docks, where he continued to work, even after becoming a successful author. Hoffer began writing The True Believer in the 1940s, as Nazism and fascism spread across Europe. Most analysts who were trying to work out how these movements became so powerful focused on their leaders and the ideas they trumpeted.

US-born historian of Europe Timothy Snyder first published Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin in 2010. In it, he argues that previous accounts of World War II have kept Nazi and Soviet crimes unduly separate, with much more attention paid to Adolf Hitler's atrocities than Joseph Stalin's. Snyder's view is that a definitive history of the period must depict the suffering of all of the conflict's victims.

Born in 1933, Philip Zimbardo is a renowned and controversial American social psychologist who is fascinated by why people can sometimes behave in awful ways. Some psychologists believe people who commit cruelty are innately evil. Zimbardo disagrees. In his 2007 book, The Lucifer Effect, he argued that it is the power of situations around us that can cause otherwise good people to commit "evil", citing many historical examples to illustrate his point.

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.

In the 1960s, British historian Jonathan Riley-Smith first began studying the knightly orders of the Middle Ages that formed after the First Crusade. By the late 1970s, he had begun writing books from a "revisionist" point of view, challenging the common belief that the Crusades were motivated by fanaticism, and were designed to plunder the Holy Lands. To an extent, Riley-Smith's 1986 book The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading overturned this previously held view.

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.

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.

When American political scientist Francis Fukuyama published The End of History and the Last Man in 1992, Western liberal democracies seemed to have won the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Fukuyama believed liberal democracy had triumphed for a reason. Any political system containing "fundamental contradictions," he thought, would eventually be replaced by something else. For Fukuyama, communism was such a system.

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.

Published in 1961, the year of Frantz Fanon's death, The Wretched of the Earth is both a powerful analysis of the psychological effects of colonization and a rallying cry for violent uprising and independence. The book rejects colonial assumptions that the people of colonized countries need to be guided by their European colonizers because they are somehow less evolved or civilized. Fanon argues that violence is justified to purge colonialism not just from the countries themselves, but from the very souls of their inhabitants.

Richard Dawkins' 1976 investigation into the science of evolution has become an enormous success, selling over a million copies in 25 languages. Drawing on the work of renowned evolutionary scientists, Dawkins makes his argument about evolution by focusing on the gene itself. While others considered evolution to occur at the level of the individual or the group, here Dawkins sees the process of natural selection differently.

In his 2007 book The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb says the Black Swans of his title can appear at any time, in the form of financial crises, wars, and other unexpected events that have profound, irreversible consequences. Taleb draws on philosophy, mathematics, economics, and other disciplines to explain in plain English why we seldom prepare for these events adequately. The way our brains process knowledge lull us into believing the future will resemble the past.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction - and the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature - novelist, orator, and outspoken public intellectual Toni Morrison is best known for her novels. In Playing in the Dark, however, she enters the realm of literary criticism. Morrison, an African American, draws attention to the often-overlooked significance of race in literature, demonstrating "the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it". Reading the racial language between the lines of classic American fiction, Morrison shows that literature is never raceless.

Published in 1980, Michael E. Porter's Competitive Strategy went against the accepted wisdom of the time that said firms should focus on expanding their market share. Porter claimed they should, in fact, analyze the five forces that mold the environment in which they compete: new entrants, substitute products, buyers, suppliers, and industry rivals. Then they could rationally choose one of three "generic strategies" - lowering cost, differentiating their product, or catering to a niche market.

Can the Subaltern Speak? is a classic of postcolonial studies, the discipline that examines the impact of colonial control on countries that gained their independence from European powers from the 1940s onwards. The essay, written in 1988 by Calcutta-born scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, argues that a core problem for the poorest and most marginalized in society (the subalterns) is that they have no platform to express their concerns, and no voice to affect policy debates or demand a fairer share.

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.

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.