Hans Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations is a classic of political science, built on the firm foundation of Morgenthau’s watertight reasoning skills.The central aim of reasoning is to construct a logi
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
Paul Kennedy owes a great deal to the editor who persuaded him to add a final chapter to this study of the factors that contributed to the rise and fall of European powers since the age of Spain's Phi
Rawls' 1971 text 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 go
Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ is a key postmodern text and is widely taught in many disciplines as one of the first texts to embrace technology from a leftist and feminist perspective using the metapho
Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ is a key postmodern text and is widely taught in many disciplines as one of the first texts to embrace technology from a leftist and feminist perspective using the metapho
On Religion is a major text for the development of modern religious thought in the West and its author, German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, is remembered as the Father of Modern Protestant The
William Whyte’s core idea in The Organization Man is that the Protestant Ethic that characterized financial and personal success in American history had been replaced in modern times by the Social Eth
Michel Foucault’s 1969 essay “What is an Author?” sidesteps the stormy arguments surrounding “intentional fallacy” and the “death of the author,” offering an entirely different way of looking at texts
Erwin Panofsky’s Meaning in the Visual Arts is considered a key work in art history. Its ideas have provoked widespread debate, and although it was first published more than sixty years ago, it contin
The impact of William James’s 1890 The Principles of Psychology is such that he is commonly known as the father of his subject. Though psychology itself is a very different discipline in the 21st-cent
Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Women is an incendiary attack on the place of women in 18th-century society.Often considered to be the earliest widely-circulated work of femini
Theory of International Politics created a "scientific revolution" in international relations, starting two major debates. It defined the 1980s controversy between the 'neorealists,' who believed that
200 years after it was written, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations is still debated by governments internationally. Smith argued that 'mercantilism'-the theory that the national economy exists
The Sociological Imagination provoked hostile reaction when it appeared for its hard-hitting attack on how sociology was practiced, and on several leading sociologists.
Few people can claim to have had minds as fertile and creative as the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. One of the most influential political theorists of the modern age, he was also a compose
C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel’s 1990 The Core Competence of the Corporation helped redefine traditional ideas of management strategy. It did so by focusing companies on one of the key critical thinking
Gilbert Ryle’s 1949 The Concept of Mind is now famous above all as the origin of the phrase “the ghost in the machine” – a phrase Ryle used to attack the popular idea that our bodies and minds are sep
Structural Anthropology (1958) not only transformed the discipline of anthropology, it also energized a movement called structuralism that came to dominate the humanities and social sciences for a gen
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.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality is a sustained feat of incisive interpretation. Well known as one of Nietzsche’s greatest works, and as one of the most important books of nineteenth
In his wonderfully clear and cogent essay On Liberty, Mill contends that individuals should be as free as possible from interference by government. Proposing that individual fulfilment is the surest r
Aristotle’s Metaphysics is a collection of essays on a wide range of topics, almost certainly never put together by Aristotle himself. This helps to explain why the material covers such a very wide ra
Anscombe's 1958 paper challenged the very foundations of moral philosophy, the discipline that tries to understand and differentiate between actions, right and wrong. It argues that moral philosophy s
Stanley Milgram is one of the most influential and widely-cited social psychologists of the twentieth century. Recognized as perhaps the most creative figure in his field, he is famous for crafting so
Emile Durkheim’s 1897 On Suicide is widely recognized as one of the foundational classic texts of sociology. It is also one that shows the degree to which strong interpretative skills can often provid
The German sociologist Max Weber is considered to be one of the founding fathers of sociology, and ranks among the most influential writers of the 20th-century. His most famous book, The Protestant Et
Homi K. Bhabha’s 1994 The Location of Culture is one of the founding texts of the branch of literary theory called postcolonialism. While postcolonialism has many strands, at its heart lies the questi
Up to the mid 20th century, generations of anthropologists had imported their own value systems into their work, regardless of where they were studying. Indigenous cultures were almost always judged t
Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez wanted to solve the problem of how the church could conduct itself to improve the lives of the poor, while consistently positioning itself as politically neutral. Des
Søren Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death is widely recognized as one of the most significant and influential works of Christian philosophy written in the nineteenth century. One of the cornerstones
The essay for which The Sacred Wood is primarily remembered is one of the most famous pieces of criticism in English: “Tradition and the Individual Talent” helped to re-orientate arguments about the s
There is arguably no more famous book about the arts of interpretation and analysis than Sigmund Freud’s 1899 Interpretation of Dreams. Though the original edition of just 600 copies took eight years
Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring is one of the few books that can claim to be epoch-making. Its closely reasoned attack on the use of pesticides in American agriculture helped thrust environmental c
Though nearly 1500 years old, The Rule of St. Benedict remains one of the most influential texts in the Western monastic movement. It offers a unique insight into the early development of Christian mo
Richard Dawkins provides excellent examples of his reasoning and interpretation skills in The Selfish Gene. His 1976 book is not a work of original research, but instead a careful explanation of evolu
The Second Sex caused uproar when it appeared in 1949. Simone de Beauvoir sets out groundbreaking ideas on what it meant to be a woman, charting the oppression of "the second sex." She argued that gen
