Geoffrey Parker spent 15 years writing this ambitious history of the tumultuous 17th century, a period in the grip of what historians term the General Crisis (2013). Global Crisis posits that colder weather was a key reason why people of the 1600s lurched between droughts, famines, and countless wars which, combined with poor political decisions, spelled disaster for people, places, and societies worldwide. A ‘fatal synergy’ between climate change and arrogant rulers exacerbated and extend...

The micro Amusings of Australian author Ian Jackson suggests a definitive 'without fanfare' approach to humour and satire. His stories and ditties sweep across different genres and subjects with a thought-provoking approach to debate and discussion. A former London resident, his narratives are ensconced deep within the heart of Hampstead, the traditional London borough that is home to some of the richest inhabitants of our planet, yet also harbours the lower orders of the population, such ...

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. Examining religious practices in relation to the Enlightenment movement and its firmly held beliefs in the power of reason and personal liberty Kant argues that God is fundamentally unknowable, and that human beings must therefore assume the responsibility of creating the Kingdom of God by acting morally. His views...

Hegel’s most influential work introduces the idea that philosophical truths are inseparable from the history of philosophy and the histories and politics of the societies in which they arise. He argues that our perception of reality is flawed, that to know anything, we must understand everything—and that everything is interrelated, forming what Hegel calls the “Absolute.” Only by understanding the Absolute can we discover what really matters. Exploring self-consciousness and social relatio...

Published in 1992, The End of History and the Last Man argues that capitalist democracy is the final destination for all societies. Fukuyama believed democracy triumphed during the Cold War because it lacks the “fundamental contradictions” inherent in communism and satisfies our yearning for freedom and equality. Democracy therefore marks the endpoint in the evolution of ideology, and so the “end of history.” There will still be “events,” but no fundamental change in ideology.

Published in 1776, when America was teetering on the brink of war with Britain, Common Sense galvanized the colonists and George Washington’s army, influencing not only the course of the Revolutionary War, but also the resultant government. For Paine, British rule in America amounted to little more than tyranny, and he went to great lengths to explain the deficiencies in the system of government that had been forced on the colonists. He not only advocated separation from Britain, but also ...

Few historians can claim to have undertaken historical analysis on as grand a scale as Geoffrey Parker in his 2013 work Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century. It is a doorstop of a book that surveys the ‘general crisis of the 17th century,’ shows that it was experienced practically throughout the world, and was not merely a European phenomenon, and links it to the impact of climate change in the form of the advent of a cold period known as t...

Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit is renowned for being one of the most challenging and important books in Western philosophy. Above all, it is famous for laying out a new approach to reasoning and philosophical argument, an approach that has been credited with influencing Karl Marx, Jean-Paul Sartre, and many other key modern philosophers. That approach is the so-called “Hegelian dialectic” – an open-ended sequence of reasoning and argument in which contradictory concepts gene...

Thomas Paine’s 1776 Common Sense has secured an unshakeable place as one of history’s most explosive and revolutionary books. A slim pamphlet published at the beginning of the American Revolution, it was so widely read that it remains the all-time best selling book in US history.An impassioned argument for American independence and for democratic government, Common Sense can claim to have helped change the face of the world more than almost any other book. But Paine’s pamp...

The eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant is as daunting as he is influential: widely considered to be not only one of the most challenging thinkers of all time, but also one of the most important. His Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason takes on two of his central preoccupations – the reasoning powers of the human mind, and religion – and applies the full force of his reasoning abilities to consider the relationship between them. In critical thinking, reasoning i...

Does prophecy really matter? Christians cannot seem to agree on it, so why spend time trying to understand future events? When souls are perishing, why become distracted by something which is not a salvation issue? Yet prophecy is important. Although not a test of orthodoxy, it helps Christians grow in their faith. This book has four aims: to establish guidelines of interpretation of prophecy; to differentiate between Dispensational and Covenant Theology (which largely determines how w...

Francis Fukuyama’s controversial 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man demonstrates an important aspect of creative thinking: the ability to generate hypotheses and create novel explanations for evidence.In the case of Fukuyama’s work, the central hypothesis and explanation he put forward were not, in fact, new, but they were novel in the academic and historical context of the time. Fukuyama’s central argument was that the end of the Cold War was a symptom of, and ...