Written in 1887, when Nietzsche was at the height of his powers as a philosopher and writer, On the Genealogy of Morality criticizes the idea that there is just one acceptable moral code.

Hegel's 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit is renowned for being one of the most challenging and important books in Western philosophy. Above all, it is famous for laying out a new approach to reasoning and philosophical argument, an approach that has been credited with influencing Karl Marx, Jean-Paul Sartre, and many other key modern philosophers.

A critical analysis of Spivak's classic 1988 postcolonial studies essay, in which she argues that the poorest and most marginalized in society (the subalterns) have no platform or voice to affect policy debates or demand a fairer share of society's goods.

Ever since the nineteenth century, people have claimed that the prosperity enjoyed by the First World was the result of its devotion to unconstrained economic freedoms. Chang claims that, in fact, First World success was due to exactly the kinds of state intervention that traditional economic thinking consistently opposes today.

Hannah Arendt's 1958 The Human Condition was an impassioned philosophical reconsideration of the goals of being human. In its arguments about the kind of lives we should lead and the political engagement we should strive for, Arendt's interpretative skills come to the fore, in a brilliant display of what high-level interpretation can achieve for critical thinking.

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.

Homi K. Bhabha's 1994 The Location of Culture is one of the founding texts of the branch of literary theory called postcolonialism. While postcolonialism has many strands, at its heart lies the question of interpreting and understanding encounters between the western colonial powers and the nations across the globe that they colonized.

Do we need religion to be good people? When Immanuel Kant tackled this question in 1793, he produced a book that remains a key text in the shaping of Western religious thought.

Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is one of the most influential works in the history of philosophy - not to mention one of the most challenging. Its topic is the nature of human knowledge, and the question of whether or not it is possible to have knowledge of the world at all.

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.