William Whyte’s core idea in The Organization Man is that the Protestant Ethic that characterized financial and personal success in American history had been replaced in modern times by the Social Ethic. This stressed the group as the source of creativity and emphasized that the greatest need of the individual is to belong to a group. To investigate this idea, Whyte spent years interviewing the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies when he was an editor at Fortune magazine, one of the top business publications in the United States at the time. What he found was that the recruitment and...

In The Wisdom of Crowds, New Yorker columnist, Surowiecki, explores the question of whether the many are better than an elite few – no matter their qualifications – at solving problems, promoting innovation and making wise decisions. Surowiecki’s text uses multiple case studies and touches on the arenas of pop culture, sociology, business management and behavioural economics among others. Surowiecki’s is a fascinating text that is key to considerations and theorisations about economics, politics and sociology.

What is a self? Greenblatt argues that the 16th century saw the awakening of modern self-consciousness, the ability to fashion an identity out of the culture and politics of one’s society. In a series of brilliant readings, Greenblatt shows how identity is constructed in the work of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser and other Renaissance writers. A classic piece of literary criticism, and the origins of the New Historicist school of thought, Renaissance Self-Fashioning remains a critical and challenging text for readers of Renaissance literature.

The City of God against the Pagans is a central text in the Western intellectual tradition. Made up of twenty-two lengthy books, Augustine wrote his masterpiece over a thirteen-year period during which the Western Roman Empire began to unravel. The first ten books are a critique of pagan religion and philosophy, while books eleven to twenty-two treat the relationship between the City of God and the Earthly City. Throughout Augustine conveys his mature vision of what it means for a Christian to live in a world with evil. Its arguments and ideas have provoked debate for nearly 1600...

Few historical problems are more baffling in retrospect than the conundrum of how Hitler was able to rise to power in Germany and then command the German people – many of whom had only marginal interest in or affiliation to Nazism – and the Nazi state. It took Ian Kershaw – author of the standard two-volume biography of Hitler – to provide a truly convincing solution to this problem. Kershaw's model blends theory – notably Max Weber's concept of ‘charismatic leadership’ – with new archival research into the development of the Hitler ‘cult’ from its origins in the 1920s...

Erwin Panofsky’s Meaning in the Visual Arts is considered a key work in art history. Its ideas have provoked widespread debate, and although it was first published more than sixty years ago, it continues to feature regularly on numerous university reading lists.

Meaning in the Visual Arts comprises nine essays. In these, Panofsky argues for the independence of iconology as a branch of history. He moves on to demonstrate the anatomy of art and its study, as well as the controlling principles of interpretation. He then deals with the theories of human proportions,...

In this book, Sedgwick examines texts from Europe and America such as Wilde, Nietzsche and Proust and considers the historical moment when sexual orientation came to be as important a signifier of personhood as gender had been for centuries. In doing this, Sedgwick provides a history of sexuality that contends that the dualistic homo/heterosexual model is as much a basis for modern culture as it is an outcome of it. Thus, Sedgwick laid the foundations of Queer Theory, contributing to the contemporary debates regarding the relationship between desire and normative structures of power, the...

Jacques Derrida’s Structure, Sign, and Play is one of the most controversial and influential philosophical texts of the 20th century. Delivered at a conference on structuralism at Johns Hopkins, the lecture took aim at the critical and philosophical fashions of the time and radically proposing a world in which meaning cannot be pinned down or traced to an origin, but instead is continuously shifting, fleeting, and open to play. Hailed by many as a watershed in philosophy and literary theory, Derrida’s lecture has shaped both disciplines. At once dense, brilliant, and humorous,...

The Defence of Poesy is the first major piece of literary criticism in English. Taking aim at classical authors who disparaged poetry, and contemporary critics who saw literature as a corrupting influence, Sidney foregrounds the moral force of poetry. Sidney considers the real life affects of poetry upon the reader arguing that the stories instill virtues like courage in the reader. He combines this moral argument with a discussion of the technical features like genre, metre and rhyme. The Defence of Poesy thus began a long tradition of poets writing about poetry and is a...

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction combats traditional art criticism’s treatment of artworks as fixed, unchanging mystical objects. For Walter Benjamin, the consequences of addressing a work of art in this manner have a wider resonance: closed off from any active visual or tactile engagement, the work of art becomes an object of passive contemplation and a potential tool of oppression.

Benjamin argues that technology has fundamentally altered the way art is experienced. Potentially open to interpretation and accessible to many, art in the age of...