The end of the Cold War, which occurred early in the 1990s, brought joy and freedom to millions. But it posed a difficult question to the world's governments and to the academics who studied them: how
Edmund Burke’s 1791 Reflections on the Revolution in France is a strong example of how the thinking skills of analysis and reasoning can support even the most rhetorical of arguments. Often cited as t
John Maynard Keynes’s 1936 General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money is a perfect example of the global power of critical thinking. A radical reconsideration of some of the founding principles
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
One of the most vital and controversial works in twentieth-century world moral philosophy, After Virtue (1981) examines how we think about, talk about, and act out our moral views in the modern world.
US psychologist Abraham Maslow’s A Theory of Human Motivation is a classic of psychological research that helped change the field for good. Like many field-changing thinkers, Maslow was not just a tal
Advertisements for soap. The image of a film star. We accept these common objects as a normal part of our life. But each also carries hidden messages that none of us even suspect - as Barthes demonstr
John Lewis Gaddis had written four previous books on the Cold War by the time he published We Now Know – so the main thrust of his new work was not so much to present new arguments as to re-examine ol
In this 1920 collection of early critical essays, Eliot proposes rules for how a poet should relate to a poem and to the poetic tradition. Arguing against the Romantic tradition of self-expression, El
Why We Can't Wait (1964) is arguably the most vital book by one of the most important men in US history. Martin Luther King Jr. sets out the ideas that fuelled a large part of the 1960s civil rights m
Gaia: A New Look At Life on Earth may continue to divide opinion, but nobody can deny that the book offers a powerful insight into the creative thinking of its author, James E. Lovelock.Published in 1
Sheila Fitzpatrick's Everyday Stalinism rejects the simplistic treatment of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian government that tightly controlled its citizens.
With the ending of World War II in 1945, the Soviet Union and the United States began the decades-long confrontation known as the Cold War. American foreign policy focused on 'containment'-preventing
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. I
In his 1997 work Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond marshals evidence from five continents and across 13,000 years of human history in an attempt to answer the question of why that history unfolded
Liquidated uses ethnographic research, traditionally used to study distant societies, to dissect the culture of high finance on New York's famous Wall Street.
What is the ultimate goal of any human society? There have been many answers to this question. But by producing a series of notably well-structured arguments, economist Mahbub ul Haq’s Reflections on
The story of the crusades has been told and retold in Western histories-but invariable from Western perspectives. Carole Hillenbrand's fresh interpretation drew on Islamic sources that describe the cr
