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Politics is one of the first books ever to investigate the concept of political philosophy. Written by the famous Greek thinker Aristotle in the fourth century BCE, it focuses on trying to understand how best to create political communities that support, serve, and improve their citizens. Aristotle investigates a number of different areas before drawing conclusions. These include an examination of existing regimes to see which are best, a look at political theories, and even an exploration of the systems of education.

Nineteenth-century American politician John C. Calhoun was unashamedly pro-slavery. So it may seem odd that A Disquisition on Government (1850), written in part to protect that practice, is so respected today. But South Carolina-born Calhoun was undoubtedly a great political thinker. Calhoun - who served his country as senator, vice president, secretary of war, and secretary of state - believed that "majority rule" inevitably led to abuse of power.

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.

One of the most influential books on economics ever written, Thomas Robert Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population remains one of the most controversial too. This 1798 work inspired naturalists Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace to develop the theory of natural selection. But it has also sparked criticism - Karl Marx famously called Malthus a "lackey of the bourgeoisie." Yet this hasn't stopped leading present-day environmentalists from taking up Malthus's ideas.

Having witnessed some negative effects of democratic revolutions in his native France, Tocqueville visited America in 1831 to see what a functioning republic looked like. His main concerns were that democracy could make people too dependent on the state and that minority voices might not be heard - a problem he termed "The Tyranny of the Majority." By examining America thoroughly, Tocqueville hoped to show how a democratic system could avoid these pitfalls.

Famous as an accomplished poet, T. S. Eliot was also the author of some highly important literary criticism. First published in 1920, The Sacred Wood collects 13 of Eliot's early critical essays. He intended them to be a statement of his principles for literary achievement. These concepts - and the works that Eliot wrote after setting out his principles - inspired many major poets of the twentieth century. Some wanted to imitate him, while many others looked to disagree with him.

In The Age of Revolution, renowned British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm focuses on the historical period from the end of the 18th century to the middle of the 19th. He concludes that the "dual revolutions" of the time - the French Revolution and the British Industrial Revolution - changed the way the whole world thought about politics and power, and fundamentally shaped the modern era.

Seventeenth-century French writer René Descartes, one of the fathers of philosophy, imagined the mind and body as two separate entities that combine to form a human being. This concept came to be called "mind-body dualism." Ryle set about ridiculing Descartes's idea of, as he put it, a "ghost in the machine" stating that it was "entirely false, and false not in detail but in principle...not merely an assemblage of particular mistakes. It is one big mistake and a mistake of a special kind."

Albert Hourani's 1991 work, A History of the Arab Peoples, is unsurpassed as an overview of Arab history, from the rise of Islam to the late 20th century. Going far beyond the political history that had generally characterized previous examinations, Hourani integrates a wide range of scholarship to provide a deep analysis of social, cultural, and economic structures. His interest in the everyday lives of Arab people and his desire to understand what united - rather than divided - many different nationalities gives listeners a new and vital perspective on the region.

In Philosophical Investigations, the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein presents a radical approach to problems in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. In fact, he sets out a radically new conception of philosophy itself. Published in 1953, two years after Wittgenstein's death, many still consider it one of the finest works of 20th century philosophy.

Published in 1990, The Anti-Politics Machine is American anthropologist James Ferguson's first book. It discusses international development projects: how they are conceived, researched, and put into practice. Importantly, it also looks at what these projects actually achieve. Ferguson is critical of the idea of development and argues that the process does not take enough account of the daily realities of the communities it is intended to benefit.

Neurologist Oliver Sacks' 1985 book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat challenges the impersonal approach doctors took to patient care and paved the way for a new literary genre: popular science. At the time of its publication, neurologists and physicians relied mainly on clinical studies and their own expertise to set the course of treatment. Sacks found this inhumane and developed a very different approach, clearly demonstrated in The Man Who Mistook His Wife.

Distinguished British historian Geoffrey Parker spent 15 years writing this ambitious history of the tumultuous 17th century, when nations were in the grip of what was known as the General Crisis. First published in 2013, Global Crisis reveals that freak weather was a key reason why the people of the 1600s lurched between droughts, famines, and countless wars.