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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.

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.

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.

Since the 19th century, people have claimed that the prosperity enjoyed by the First World was the result of its devotion to unconstrained economic freedoms. In his 2003 book Kicking Away the Ladder, South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang claims this was not the case and that, in fact, First World economic success was due to exactly the kinds of state intervention that traditional economic thinking consistently opposes today.

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.

Gordon W. Allport's 1954 book The Nature of Prejudice helped mold the ways in which psychologists investigate prejudice. But the American's work reached further than that, also helping to shape society as a whole and making a substantial contribution to the US Civil Rights Movement, as well as to the country's anti-discrimination and anti-segregation laws of the 1950s and 1960s.

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.

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 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.

First available in 1689, John Locke's Two Treatises of Government is considered one of the most important works ever written on the foundations of government. Published anonymously, it argues against the popular idea at the time that monarchs have a God-given right to rule. Instead Locke proposes that sovereignty - supreme authority - ultimately resides with the people.

Published in 1974, Roll Jordan, Roll is American historian Eugene Genovese's epic study of slavery in the United States in the late 18th and 19th centuries. It provides a nuanced understanding of the relationship between master and slave. Slave owners saw it as their duty to limit slaves' freedoms for their own good, as a father might deal with his children. But Genovese looked beyond this notion of paternalism to suggest the relationship was more complex.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

In her 1958 article "Modern Moral Philosophy", British philosopher Elizabeth (G. E. M.) Anscombe does nothing less than challenge the very foundations of moral philosophy, the discipline that tries to understand right and wrong action. The article sets out three main ideas. First, that moral philosophy should not be explored until a philosophy of psychology is already in place. Second, that philosophers who do not believe in God should not use ideas about "obligation" and "duty".

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.

First published in 1973, Albert Bandura's Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis is a groundbreaking work that helped lay the foundations of the discipline of social psychology. Much of what we now know about the influences of the early childhood environment on delinquency and anti-social behavior can be traced back to Bandura's work. In the book, he uses the subject of aggression to demonstrate and explore the usefulness of what is called social learning theory.