Books like End and Beginning by Franz Borkenau

Michel Foucault’s seminal work traces the evolution of punishment and surveillance, revealing how modern societies exercise power through disciplinary institutions such as prisons, schools, and hospitals.

Hannah Arendt’s seminal study charts the rise of totalitarianism from 19th‑century anti‑Semitism and European colonialism to the emergence of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, examining propaganda, terror, and mass mobilization.

A comparative study of the American, French, and Russian revolutions.

Explores how the early Christian Church reshaped Western intellectual life, turning a culture of inquiry into one that subordinates the mind to authority and accepts divine incomprehensibility as inevitable.

C. Wright Mills’ 1956 classic examines how a tight-knit group of legislators, corporate leaders and military officers wield power to shape national decisions, sidelining genuine democracy.

From Dawn to Decadence traces the arc of Western culture from the Renaissance to the present, blending historical analysis with literary insight.

*At the End of an Age* is a deeply informed and rewarding reflection on the nature of historical and scientific knowledge. Of extraordinary philosophical, religious, and historical scope, it is the product of a great historian’s lifetime of thought on the subject of his discipline and the human condition. While running counter to most of the accepted ideas and doctrines of our time, it offers a compelling framework for understanding history, science, and man’s capacity for self-knowledge. In this work, John Lukacs describes how we in the Western world have now been living through the ending of an entire historical age that began in Western Europe about five hundred years ago. Unlike people during the ending of the Middle Ages or the Roman empire, we can know where we are. But how and what is it that we know? In John Lukacs’s view, there is no science apart from scientists, and all of “Science,” including our view of the universe, is a human creation, imagined and defined by fallible human beings in a historical continuum. This radical and reactionary assertion―in its way a summa of the author’s thinking, expressed here and there in many of his previous twenty-odd books―leads to his fundamental assertion that, contrary to all existing cosmological doctrines and theories, it is this earth which is the very center of the universe―the only universe we know and can know.

The Educated Mind presents a fresh vision for education, showing how intellectual tools like language shape learning and proposing curriculum changes that align with how children naturally acquire knowledge.

This monumental work, complete here in one volume, undertakes to determine scientifically what distinctive personality traits characterize the phenomenon of prejudice. The authors' purpose is to discover the social psychological factors which have made it possible for the authoritarian type of man - a new concept of an "anthropological" species - to threaten the survival of the individualistic and democratic type prevalent in the past century and a half of our civilization. The book mobilizes the skills of the different branches of the social sciences in one common research program. Experts in the fields of social theory and depth psychology, depth analysis, clinical psychology, political sociology and projective testing have pooled their methods and resources. Working in the closest cooperation, they here present a detailed picture of the authoritarian type of man. By isolating the destructive germ of the authoritarian personality, the book lays a major foundation for long-range attack upon the anti-democratic forces in modern society. (from the back cover.)

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn.