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Michel Foucault had already written extensively about medicine, madness, and prisons. But in the latter days of his career, he turned to the subject of sexuality, planning six volumes on the subject. He completed three before dying of an AIDS-related illness in 1984. Foucault's History of Sexuality Vol. 1 is a study of the evolution of cultural ideas about sex in the West since the end of the 17th century. Volume two looked at attitudes toward sex in ancient Greece; volume three investigated sex in ancient Rome.

Published in 1938, Cyril Lionel Robert (C. L. R.) James' The Black Jacobins is the little-known story of the only successful slave revolution known in history. It was this 12-year struggle of the African slaves in the French colony of San Domingo that led to the establishment of the Republic of Haiti in 1804. The uprising was inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution that had begun in 1789, just two years before, and in this work James goes to great lengths to show the relationship between the two upheavals.

Born in 1933, Philip Zimbardo is a renowned and controversial American social psychologist who is fascinated by why people can sometimes behave in awful ways. Some psychologists believe people who commit cruelty are innately evil. Zimbardo disagrees. In his 2007 book, The Lucifer Effect, he argued that it is the power of situations around us that can cause otherwise good people to commit "evil", citing many historical examples to illustrate his point.

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.

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".

Religion and the Decline of Magic examines popular belief in 16th and 17th century England, a key period during which leaders of the Protestant Reformation tried to disentangle magic from religion itself. Thomas argues that magic was popular because it offered practical solutions to everyday problems. Few social historians had examined the popular religious beliefs of the 1500s at the time Thomas wrote Religion.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Meditations is a remarkable work, a unique insight into the thinking of one of the most conscientious and able Roman emperors, Marcus Aurelius, who ruled at the apex of Roman might in the late second century CE. It was never intended to be widely circulated. Indeed, it was almost unknown until the 16th century. The work is like a series of jottings, written for its author's own improvement; it has no formal structure and its arguments follow no obvious pattern.

Traditionally, managers assumed people were lazy and would not work unless strictly controlled. McGregor, however, believed this form of management to be based on faulty assumptions about human nature, and felt that managers should reflect on their assumptions about what motivates people. He proposed they draw on research in psychology and the other social sciences to create working conditions that allow all employees to realize their full human potential.

In his 1997 work Guns, Germs, and Steel, American geography professor and environmental historian Jared Diamond looks to answer the question of why human history unfolded differently on different continents, and why power and wealth became distributed as they are.

The ideas set out by American international relations expert Robert O. Keohane in 1984's After Hegemony have had a huge impact on policy debates over the last three decades, both in political circles and in academia. Hegemony means the social, cultural, ideological or economic influence of one dominant group. Contemplating a post-Cold War world half a decade before the Berlin Wall fell, Keohane asks if international cooperation can survive in the absence of a single superpower.

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.

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.

De Beauvoir's book charted the oppression of "the second sex" in terms never before seen in the academic world. Her most startling theory became a rallying cry for the feminist movement: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." She argued that gender identity was shaped by upbringing in a world ruled by men. A leading light in the existentialist movement, de Beauvoir applied the radical philosophy of personal choice and freedom to argue that women were subjugated in every area of life.

Western thinking about the Middle and Far East has been distorted by stereotype and inaccuracy. This argument lies at the center of Palestinian-American literary theorist Edward Said's groundbreaking book, Orientalism. Originally published in 1978, it cemented Said's reputation as the father of postcolonial studies.

In 1999's Everyday Stalinism, historian Sheila Fitzpatrick rejects the common practice of simplistically treating the Soviet Union as a totalitarian government that tightly controlled its citizens. She takes advantage of vast archives that were released after the Cold War to examine Soviet society "from below" - looking at how ordinary citizens coped with shortages and the general sense of fear created by the state.