Gutierrez's 1971 book provides an inspiring argument as to how Christians and the Roman Catholic Church should support the poor. The Catholic Church had traditionally seen itself as politically neutral but in the 1960s and 70s reformers, such as Gutierrez, urged it to seriously address real-world issues such as poverty and oppression.

Ever since the nineteenth century, people have claimed that the prosperity enjoyed by the First World was the result of its devotion to unconstrained economic freedoms. Chang claims that, in fact, First World success was due to exactly the kinds of state intervention that traditional economic thinking consistently opposes today.

Hamid Dabashi suggests that the Iranian Revolution of 1978-9 would not have taken place had it not been for the influential ideas set out by eight Iranian Islamic thinkers in the decades before it occurred.

Morgenthau's classic text, published in 1948, not only introduced the concept of political realism, but also established it as the dominant approach in international relations and the guiding philosophy of US foreign policy during the Cold War. Politics Among Nations begins with a discussion of the principles that guide political realism.

First published in 1980, The 'Hitler Myth' is recognized as one of the most important books yet written about Adolf Hitler and the Nazi State. Focusing on what he called the 'history of everyday life,' Kershaw investigated the attitude of the German people toward Hitler.

Do we need religion to be good people? When Immanuel Kant tackled this question in 1793, he produced a book that remains a key text in the shaping of Western religious thought.

The Anti-Politics Machine (1990) examines how international development projects are conceived, researched, and put into practice. It also looks at what these projects actually achieve.

American author, journalist, and activist Jane Jacobs was born in 1916 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. She moved to New York City in 1934, where she became a journalist, writing for magazines including Architectural Forum and Fortune.