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In Citizen and Subject, Ugandan academic and author Mahmood Mamdani challenges dominant views about the crisis of postcolonial Africa. Many studies emphasize that the problems the continent faces are homegrown - the consequence of poor government, widespread corruption, and other local factors. Citizen and Subject challenged these ideas. It argues that the current crisis has come about because of the institutional legacy of colonialism.

History of the Peloponnesian War was the first major work of political inquiry that did not relate events to divine influences. It introduced instead a critical method of looking to the facts of human actions as the basis of our understanding - a method that continues to be used today, more than two millennia later. Many of the most important political thinkers in the Western tradition cite Thucydides as an influence, and major figures including Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and Friedrich Nietzsche have praised his writing.

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.

One of the most influential works of political theory ever written, The Federalist Papers collects 85 essays from 1787 and 1788, when the United States was a new country looking to find its way politically. Thomas Jefferson, author of the country's Declaration of Independence and a future US president, called the work "the best commentary on the principles of government which ever was written".

David Graeber's 2011 book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, seeks to overturn hundreds of years of economic theory, specifically the idea that people have a natural inclination to trade with each other and that the concept of money developed spontaneously to overcome the inefficiencies of a bartering system. The US-born social activist uses his training as an anthropologist to trace the histories of money and of debt and reaches the conclusion that money was in fact created by the state as a means of exploiting the poor.

In her 1958 work, political theorist Hannah Arendt asks two fundamental questions: "Under what conditions do politics emerge?" and "Under what conditions can politics be eliminated?" In searching for answers she turns some long-established thinking on its head. Ancient political philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle believed that a life spent thinking was more important than an active life of labor, work, and action. But Arendt argues that political action is every bit as important as political thinking.

First published in Germany in 1980, British historian Ian Kershaw's The "Hitler Myth" is recognized as one of the most important books ever written about Adolf Hitler and the Nazi State. Kershaw wanted to focus on what he called the "history of everyday life", and so investigated the attitude of the German public to Hitler at the time, rather than looking at the dictator from the perspective of those in positions of power. He was intrigued to find out how someone like Hitler could have become such a powerful figure.

Anthropologist Geert Hofstede's 1980 work, Culture's Consequences, was the first study to look at cultural differences using data. The Dutchman took advantage of the enormous global span of his employer, the technology company IBM, to gather survey data in 20 languages and across 70 countries, and to produce a unique study of national values.

Austrian-born economist Friedrich Hayek's 1944 work, The Road to Serfdom, analyzes the ways in which excessive government planning can erode democracy. Published while World War II still raged, the work draws influential parallels between the totalitarianism of both socialism and Nazism and increasing control exerted by Western democracies.

In his 1966 book, The Night Battles, Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg detailed the lives of peasant people who were marginalized in their own society and have been all but forgotten in ours. He created a new school of study, microhistory, which has influenced thinkers from a range of different disciplines. The Night Battles looks at the witch trials of a small group of peasants in 16th-century Italy who believed they turned into animals at night to ward off evil spirits and safeguard their crops.

Richard Dawkins' 1976 investigation into the science of evolution has become an enormous success, selling over a million copies in 25 languages. Drawing on the work of renowned evolutionary scientists, Dawkins makes his argument about evolution by focusing on the gene itself. While others considered evolution to occur at the level of the individual or the group, here Dawkins sees the process of natural selection differently.

Søren Kierkegaard has long been considered the father of the philosophical movement known as Christian existentialism, which focuses on the living human being. In his major 1849 work, The Sickness unto Death, he takes listeners on a journey from the human self, its spirit, despair and sin, through to faith.

Its arguments would go on to shape global economics and influence world leaders in the late 20th century, but Capitalism and Freedom was largely ignored when it was first published in 1962. The first work written for the general public by American economist Milton Friedman, the book argues that a free market with little government interference is the best way to run society.

American lawyer-turned-sociologist David Riesman published his first book, The Lonely Crowd, in 1950. Aimed at academics, it nonetheless gained a large popular audience. In it, Riesman explores the links between social character - the ways in which members of a society are similar to one another - and social structures. Riesman's work popularized sociology, helping to establish it as an academic discipline, and today it provides a fascinating window into the 1950s American psyche.

Kenneth Waltz's Theory of International Politics created a "scientific revolution" in international relations, starting two major debates. In the 1980s it defined the controversy between the neorealists, who believed that competition between states was inevitable, and the neoliberals, who believed that states could cooperate with each other. As the debate wound down with the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, a second more fundamental debate began.

What is the nature of our personal relationship with God? That's the core question of Fear and Trembling. If God asks us to do something we instinctively feel is unethical, must we obey and have faith that he knows best? Examining this question, Danish philosopher Kierkegaard considers the biblical story in which God commands Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. His unique reading of the story breaks new ground, focusing on our relationship with God at an individual level.

English historian Christopher Hill turned thinking about the English Civil Wars (1642-51) on its head when he published The World Turned Upside Down in 1972. Instead of focusing on power struggles in the upper echelons of English society - on the battle between the monarchy and would-be republicans - Hill looked to develop "history from below", investigating the lives of ordinary people, the way they saw society, and their political hopes for the future.

A self-educated man, Eric Hoffer was most likely born in 1898. He wrote in his spare time after doing shifts on the San Francisco docks, where he continued to work, even after becoming a successful author. Hoffer began writing The True Believer in the 1940s, as Nazism and fascism spread across Europe. Most analysts who were trying to work out how these movements became so powerful focused on their leaders and the ideas they trumpeted.

Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks offers a radical analysis of the psychological effects of colonization on the colonized. Born in 1925 on the island of Martinique - at the time a French colony - Fanon witnessed firsthand the abuses of white colonizers and the system's effects on his country. His revulsion was only confirmed later in life when he worked as a psychiatrist in Algeria, another French colony. Fanon's work played a pivotal role in the civil rights movements of the 1960s and was later taken up by scholars of postcolonialist studies.

A professor at Harvard Business School, Kotter spent years coaching organizations - large and small; successful, less successful, and nearly bankrupt - through their own change processes. Some worked; others didn't. Distilling wisdom from these experiences, Kotter identifies eight common mistakes managers make implementing change. He then uses them to propose an eight-stage model that he argues can lead to successful organizational transformation.