Europeans once thought all swans were white, and white' was part of how they defined 'swan.' Then black swans were discovered, and the definition changed forever. I

Ernest Gellner - a Jew who escaped from Czechoslovakia in 1939 after Hitler invaded - knew first-hand the catastrophic effects of excessive nationalism, and he was determined to understand the phenomenon that had shaped so much of 20th century history.

Edited and produced from the lecture notes of his students at the University of Geneva, the Course in General Linguistics was first published in 1916, three years after its author's death. The book sets out Saussure's theory that all languages share the same underlying structure, regardless of historical or cultural context.

How does a state control its citizens? Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish answers this question by investigating the prison system. Foucault argues that prison created and merged into a wider system of surveillance that extends throughout society.

Like Foucault's earlier works, The History of Sexuality (1976) is ground-breaking and controversial. His claim that sexuality is more a social concept than the product of biological instincts challenges the accepted idea that it was the rise of modernity and capitalism that resulted in repression of sexualities.

Published in 1992, The End of History and the Last Man argues that capitalist democracy is the final destination for all societies. Fukuyama believed democracy triumphed during the Cold War because it lacks the "fundamental contradictions" inherent in communism and satisfies our yearning for freedom and equality.

Dikotter's 2010 masterpiece catalogues the tragedy and the cover-up of the hideous famine caused by the Great Leap Forward-Mao Zedong's disastrous attempt to jumpstart industrialization in China in the late 1950s.

Frantz Fanon's 1961 masterpiece is both a powerful analysis of the psychological effects of colonization and a rallying cry for violent uprising and independence.