Sociologist, historian and political economist, Max Weber is one of the most important thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His astonishing range and penetrating insights resulted in many influential books spanning religion, society, politics, and economics, permanently affecting the direction of the social sciences.

General Economic History, published in 1923 (three years after Weber's death) and compiled from meticulous notes taken by his students, ranks as one of his most important books. It is a landmark work in economic history. From early forms of...

Hailed as the 'Guru of the New Left' and a leading figure of 1960s counterculture and liberation movements, the philosopher Herbert Marcuse is amongst the most renowned and controversial thinkers of the twentieth century. Eros and Civilization is one of his best-known books and brought him international fame.

Taking his cue from Freud's view that repression of the instincts is a defining characteristic of the human mind, Marcuse fuses Freud's insight with Marx's theories of alienation and oppression. He argues that rather than our instincts turned in on themselves, it...

Few philosophers have had a more lasting impact on the philosophy of history than Friedrich Hegel. Reason and Revolution is Herbert Marcuse's brilliant interpretation of Hegel's philosophy and the influence it has had on political thought, from the French Revolution to the twentieth century.

In a masterpiece of dialectical thought, Marcuse superbly illuminates the implications of Hegel's philosophy, rescuing it from the taint of reactionary thought that distorted or dismissed it for the early part of the twentieth century. After a masterful survey of the main elements...

Philosopher, sociologist and urban theorist, Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) was one of the great social theorists of the twentieth century and pioneered the theorization of everyday life and space.

In this fascinating book, which became a manifesto for urban activism upon its first publication in the 1960s, Lefebvre poses a major question: what gives a society undergoing constant change the illusion of stability? For Lefebvre, the answer is that our everyday lives are the product of decisions from which we are alienated, resulting in what he memorably describes as...

Simone Weil (1909–1943) is one of the most brilliant and unorthodox religious and philosophical minds of the twentieth century. She was also a political activist, worked in the Renault car factory in France in the 1930s and fought briefly as an anarchist in the Spanish Civil War, before her tragic early death in England at the age of thirty-four. Her work spans an astonishing variety of subjects, from ancient Greek philosophy and Christianity to oppression, political freedom and French national identity.

Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks sees Weil...