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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.

Meditations is a remarkable work, a unique insight into the thinking of one of the most conscientious and able Roman emperors, Marcus Aurelius, who ruled at the apex of Roman might in the late second century CE. It was never intended to be widely circulated. Indeed, it was almost unknown until the 16th century. The work is like a series of jottings, written for its author's own improvement; it has no formal structure and its arguments follow no obvious pattern.

Do people always act rationally and in their own best interests? US economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein did not believe so, and were convinced that psychological factors often stopped people from making the best decisions. Their 2008 work Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness argues that governments should "nudge" citizens to make better choices in all sorts of areas, from eating habits, to health, to financial planning.

Democracy and Its Critics is a modern classic that integrates Robert A. Dahl's democratic thinking as it developed over the course of his academic career. It makes an important contribution to theories about democracy and remains widely cited and debated. Dahl offers an interpretation of democratic theory and practice that is relevant to the modern world and that pays special attention to the problems highlighted by people who criticize democracy.

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.

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.

Stanley Milgram was a young researcher at Yale in the 1960s when he recruited volunteers to help in a psychology experiment. These volunteers were asked to give electric shocks to "learners" whenever they got an answer to a question wrong. The "learners" were in on the deception, and were not actually receiving shocks, but the volunteers were unaware of this. To widespread surprise, Milgram reported that 40 to 65 percent of his volunteers did what the researcher told them, and gave the maximum shock to the "learners" even when they screamed in pain.

"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.

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.

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.

Under the title "Civil Disobedience", American author Henry David Thoreau's essay was originally published in 1866, four years after his death in 1862. It is based on a lecture, "Resistance to Civil Government", that Thoreau gave many years earlier, in 1848. "Civil Disobedience" asked when an individual should actively oppose a government and its justice system. Thoreau's answer was that opposition was legitimate whenever government actions or institutions were unacceptable to an individual's conscience.

After World War II ended in 1945, the Soviet Union and the United States began a decades-long confrontation that would become known as the Cold War. American foreign policy focused on "containment" - preventing the communist USSR from gaining more ground - and many people looked at the geographical and political implications of this policy. Others, meanwhile, explored American domestic life in that same period. But historian Elaine Tyler May became the first person to bring these seemingly unrelated areas together.

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.

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.

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.

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.

James E. Lovelock says the Earth (Gaia) is a superorganism, made up of all living things, interacting with the air, the oceans, and the surface rocks of the planet. He suggests Gaia takes an active role in keeping the planet safe for life, with automatic feedback mechanisms making adjustments as needed. Lovelock describes feedback mechanisms that are widely accepted. It is the implication that Gaia is somehow self-aware that is controversial.

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.

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.

In 2009's Liquidated, anthropologist Karen Z. Ho takes the tools of ethnographic research, which are traditionally used to study distant societies, and instead uses them to dissect the culture of high finance on New York's famous Wall Street. Through close observation of the daily lives of the bankers working there, and the beliefs, rituals, and timeframes that define them, Ho uncovers a distinct culture in which she finds the ultimate causes of the financial crises of recent times.