Resultado narrado por "Macat" em Todas as categorias

Published in 2011, The Better Angels of Our Nature is a gloriously optimistic book. In it, well-known cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker put forward an argument that contradicted what most people believed at the time. Pinker said that despite humanity's biological tendency toward violence, we are, in fact, less violent today than ever before. To prove it, he laid out pages of detailed statistical evidence.

William worked on The Principles of Psychology throughout the 1880s, while teaching psychology and philosophy at Harvard University. He drew together various styles of science to create a unified whole, and to establish psychology as a valid discipline. Not only did he achieve this, but he also created concepts - such as thought being a "stream of consciousness" - that have found their way into both the arts, and popular conversation.

Because the potential returns appear to be greater in poorer countries than in the developed world, modern economic theory implies that rich countries should continually invest in poor countries until returns balance out. In fact, this doesn't happen. Economist Robert E. Lucas Jr. asks why in his groundbreaking 1990 article, "Why Doesn't Capital Flow from Rich to Poor Countries?" The question has become known as the Lucas paradox. Lucas analyzes this, focusing especially on the role of human capital.

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.

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.

Economist Amartya Sen's 1997 work Development as Freedom presents a "middle way" approach to how we should look at international development, based on the idea that its success or failure cannot be measured by income alone. Having grown up in India, Sen brings his own understanding of what poverty really means to the issue, arguing that above all, the process and goal of development must be human freedom. He backs up this idea through his concept of "capabilities."

Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez's 1971 book, A Theology of Liberation, provides an inspiring and groundbreaking argument as to how Christians and the Roman Catholic Church should act in support of the poor. The Catholic Church had traditionally seen itself as politically neutral. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, reformers such as Gutiérrez urged it to seriously address real-world issues such as poverty and oppression.

When American sociologist C. Wright Mills's The Sociological Imagination was first published in 1959, it provoked much hostile reaction. This was understandable: the book was a hard-hitting attack on how sociology was practiced - and on a number of leading sociologists. Mills was a fierce critic of both modern capitalism and Soviet-style authoritarianism, and argued that the sociology profession failed to look at how people's problems are connected to the structures of the society in which they live.

Mahbub ul Haq died in 1998, three years after the publication of his important work, Reflections on Human Development. The book appeared at the end of Haq's impressive career in international development and described his revolutionary contribution to the discipline. In it, Haq argues that the goal of any society should be to improve the lives of its citizens, therefore economic development should support that aim.

US psychologist Abraham Maslow's 1943 essay "A Theory of Human Motivation" established his idea of humanistic psychology as a "third force" in the field. He outlined a new approach to understanding the mind, saying humans are motivated by their need to satisfy a series of hierarchical needs, starting with the most essential first. He thought it important for the advancement of psychology to identify, group, and rank them in terms of priority.

Michael R. Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi's 1990 work, A General Theory of Crime, assessed contemporary work in criminology, while also introducing a new, comprehensive theory of crime. At the time, researchers tended to focus on environmental factors that led to crime, not on the criminals themselves. Additionally, crime researchers came from different disciplines and inclined towards thinking about crime only from their particular perspective. This meant ideas about what caused crime, and how to prevent it, were often in conflict.

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.

Based around a Marxist understanding of class struggle, Lefebvre sees the revolution not just as a political crisis, but also as an assault on inherited privilege and the social hierarchy. Ultimately, it succeeded because people at every level of society - from nobles and the elite bourgeois to peasants and the urban masses - found the will to defy the crown. Lefebvre's book was later interpreted by some as simplistic and overly partisan, designed as a rallying call to his fellow countrymen.

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.

Søren Kierkegaard has long been considered the father of the philosophical movement known as Christian existentialism, which focuses on the living human being. In his major 1849 work, The Sickness unto Death, he takes listeners on a journey from the human self, its spirit, despair and sin, through to faith.

"Common Sense" was published in 1776, at a time when America, then a colony of Great Britain, was teetering on the brink of war. It was an immediate success, a best seller, and was credited with galvanizing the people of America and George Washington's army. Paine's approach followed a path blazed by earlier thinkers such as John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, though he radicalized both their positions. For Paine, British rule in America amounted to little more than tyranny.

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.

American sociologist Jack A. Goldstone examines the causes of revolutions and uprisings in the period between 1500 and 1800. Investigating cases in both Europe and Asia, the conclusions he reaches are surprising. Many thinkers had previously believed that Europe's distinctive history - and particularly the rise of capitalism - had created the specific revolutions and political changes that launched the continent on a path to global supremacy. Goldstone says this is wrong, and that European and Asian states were, in fact, all experiencing similar developments.

The title of Norwegian-born historian Odd Arne Westad's 2005 work - The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times - offers a window into his thesis. Between the end of World War II and the early 1990s, both the Soviet Union and the United States "intervened" (or "offered aid and support to") developing nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In Westad's view, these interventions were more important than events in Europe, where most studies of the Cold War focus.

Published in 1996, Arjun Appadurai's Modernity at Large is an edited collection of earlier essays that had already made the Indian-born anthropologist an influential figure in his field of cultural anthropology. Appadurai here presents a theory of globalization, and suggests ways that other researchers can follow up on his ideas. Many of them continue to do so. For anthropologists, the book offered new ways of thinking about how communities are affected by globalization.