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First published in 1948, Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks is an important Marxist work that says we must understand societies both in terms of their economic relationships and their cultural beliefs. Gramsci wanted to explore why Russia had undergone a socialist revolution in 1917 while other European countries had not. So he developed the concept of hegemony, which is the idea that those who hold power in a society can maintain and use that power because of their own grip on cultural values and economic relationships.

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.

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.

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.

Published in 1974 in the journal Science, the article Judgment Under Uncertainty had a profound impact across the social sciences. Two relatively young Israeli psychologists were challenging the leading ideas about human thought. For decades, social scientists had used a mythical figure to describe how humans make decisions: homo economicus. Homo economicus was logical and conscientious.

Published in 1925, The Gift is one of French sociologist Marcel Mauss's few non-collaborative works. In it, he elevates what might appear to be a simple gift from the status of innocent object to something that has the capacity to motivate people and define social relationships. The Gift analyzes cultures across the world and across time, with the way gifts are given and received working as a guide to understanding the rules and traditions of many different societies.

Published in 1961, the year of Frantz Fanon's death, The Wretched of the Earth is both a powerful analysis of the psychological effects of colonization and a rallying cry for violent uprising and independence. The book rejects colonial assumptions that the people of colonized countries need to be guided by their European colonizers because they are somehow less evolved or civilized. Fanon argues that violence is justified to purge colonialism not just from the countries themselves, but from the very souls of their inhabitants.

Social anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard wrote Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande after 20 months' fieldwork with the Azande people of the South Sudan. It became the founding text in the anthropology of witchcraft, and has been hailed as a classic. Although Witchcraft had little impact when it first appeared in 1937, its popularity grew after World War II. Alongside his subsequent work on the Nuer people, Witchcraft established Evans-Pritchard's reputation as an important anthropologist.

Why do we want to justify our decisions, even if they appear to be irrational? The answer lies in cognitive dissonance, the mental discomfort we experience when we hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time. In A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, first published in 1957, American social psychologist Leon Festinger investigates the problem. Festinger puts forward the idea that we have developed mechanisms to try to deal with the stress brought on by cognitive dissonance.

Issues of human rights and freedoms always inflame passions, and John Rawls's A Theory of Justice will do the same. Published in 1971, it links the idea of social justice to a basic sense of fairness that recognizes human rights and freedoms. Controversially, though, it also accepts differences in the distribution of goods and services - as long as they benefit the worst off in society.

Can the Subaltern Speak? is a classic of postcolonial studies, the discipline that examines the impact of colonial control on countries that gained their independence from European powers from the 1940s onwards. The essay, written in 1988 by Calcutta-born scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, argues that a core problem for the poorest and most marginalized in society (the subalterns) is that they have no platform to express their concerns, and no voice to affect policy debates or demand a fairer share.

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.

Iranian American writer and scholar Hamid Dabashi wrote Iran: A People Interrupted amid the political fallout following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York - his adopted city - in 2001. As US President George W. Bush declared a "war on terror" and named Iran as part of an "axis of evil" that supported terrorism, Dabashi offered an insider's insight into the Iranian psyche.

While previous scholars of international history had focused on "great men" and their achievements, Paul Kennedy focused on the interdependent relationship between military might and economic growth. In his 1987 work, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, he shows why countries that balance the economic and the military can become "great powers." Those that fail to do so, however, risk imperial overstretch and failure.

What might society look like if we were brave enough to emerge fully from the shadow of the Christian God? The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche explores this intriguing question in his 1886 work, Beyond Good and Evil. Going further, Nietzsche then asks of his "philosophers of the future" that they take on the challenge of supplying humanity with new ideals to live by.

According to Aristotle, the ultimate human good is eudaimonia, an ancient Greek word that can be translated as happiness, or flourishing. Eudaimonia comes from a life of virtuous (or good) action. Virtues such as justice, restraint, and practical wisdom cannot simply be taught - they must be developed over time by cultivating virtuous habits. The making of virtuous choices can be developed by using practical wisdom and by recognizing the desirable middle ground between extremes of human behavior.

Though written around 1513, more than 500 years ago, Italian diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince is still very influential. Listeners turn to it for its direct advice on the question of how to attain - and retain - power. Machiavelli's answer, in brief: use any means necessary to make sure the state survives. Given the changeable nature of politics, the strong ruler that Machiavelli describes may need to lie or cheat, deceive and, if necessary, resort to acts of violence - all the while maintaining an "image" of goodness.

Politics as a Vocation examines what makes good political leaders and explores the effects of political action on modern societies. On one level it summarizes the political scholarship of one of the founding fathers of social science. On another it reflects a leading German academic and political activist's practical concerns about the future at a time of great volatility following defeat in World War I.

Sociologist Émile Durkheim's 1897 work On Suicide is a powerful evidence-based study of why people take their own lives. In the late 19th century it was generally accepted that each suicide was an individual phenomenon, caused by such personal factors as grief, loss, and financial problems. But Durkheim felt there were patterns in suicide rates, and believed that a more likely cause of suicide lay in the individual's relationship to society.

US-born historian of Europe Timothy Snyder first published Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin in 2010. In it, he argues that previous accounts of World War II have kept Nazi and Soviet crimes unduly separate, with much more attention paid to Adolf Hitler's atrocities than Joseph Stalin's. Snyder's view is that a definitive history of the period must depict the suffering of all of the conflict's victims.