Our Ecological Footprint presents a powerful model for measuring humanity’s impact on the Earth to reduce the harm we are causing the planet before it’s too late.While some people believe we can find
When it was published in 2008, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness quickly became one of the most influential books in modern economics an
Dikotter's 2010 masterpiece catalogues the tragedy and the cover-up of the hideous famine caused by the Great Leap Forward-Mao Zedong's disastrous attempt to jumpstart industrialization in China in th
Perhaps the most peculiar feature of a financial bubble – one that Charles Kindleberger's classic work Manias, Panics and Crashes draws particular attention to – is the inability of those trapped insi
Why do we attempt to justify decisions that are clearly irrational? The answer lies in "cognitive dissonance," the feeling of mental discomfort we experience when we hold two contradictory beliefs at
A Room of One's Own is a very clear example of how creative thinkers connect and present things in novel ways.Based on the text of a talk given by Virginia Woolf at an all-female Cambridge college, Ro
Originally published in 1861, Mill's great work systematically details and defends the doctrine of utilitarianism. Arguing first that a "morally good" action is one that increases the general sum of h
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
More than a classic work on the history and philosophy of science, Kuhn's 1962 book is considered by many to be one of the greatest works of the 20th century. Kuhn helped change the way everyone looks
Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 essay on the history of the United States remains one of the most famous and influential works in the American canon.That is a testament to Turner's powers of creative
The Republic is Plato's most complete and incisive work – a detailed study of the problem of how best to ensure that justice exists in a real society, rather than as merely the product of an idealized
In his ground-breaking 1936 study The General Theory, Keynes argues that traditional economics has misunderstood the causes of unemployment. Employment is not determined by the price of labor; it is d
Few works can claim to form the foundation stones of one entire academic discipline, let alone two, but Thucydides's celebrated History of the Peloponnesian War is not only one of the first great work
Excited by the scientific breakthroughs of the day, David Hume set out to construct a science of the mind. 1748's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is the result. A work that had a huge influe
The Age of Revolution is the first of four works by Eric Hobsbawm that collectively synthesize the ideas he developed over a lifetime spent studying the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Hobsbawm's v
In Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein presents a radical approach to the philosophy of language and the mind, setting out a startlingly fresh conception of philosophy itself. Wittgenste
Few works of history make as well-structured a case for the importance of studying continuity, rather than change, than Albert Hourani's A History of the Arab Peoples.Hourani’s work had three major ai
Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is one of the most influential works in the history of philosophy – not to mention one of the most challenging. Its topic is the nature of human knowledge, and
Thomas Piketty is a fine example of an evaluative thinker. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, he not only provides detailed and sustained explanations of why he sees existing arguments relating t
Of all the controversies facing historians today, few are more divisive or more important than the question of how the Holocaust was possible. What led thousands of Germans – many of them middle-aged
A key theme of Gayatri Spivak's work is agency: the ability of the individual to make their own decisions. While Spivak's main aim is to consider ways in which "subalterns" – her term for the indigeno
How does a state control its citizens? Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish answers this question by investigating the prison system. Foucault argues that prison created and merged into a wider sys
Sun Tzu's The Art of War is a series of lessons in the applied art of problem solving.Sun (544 BC-496 BC), an experienced general from the Warring States period of Chinese history, saw war as an inevi
John Locke’s 1689 Two Treatises of Government is a key text in the history of political theory – one whose influence remains marked on modern politics, the American Constitution and beyond.Two Treatis
C.S. Lewis's 1943 The Abolition of Man is subtitled 'Reflections on Education With Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools.'
To the dismay of many commentators – who had hoped the world was evolving into a more tolerant and multicultural community of nations united under the umbrellas of supranational movements like the Eur
Arjun Appadurai’s 1996 collection of essays Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization helped reshape how anthropologists, geographers and philosophers saw and understood the key topic o
René Descartes’s 1641 Meditations on First Philosophy is a cornerstone of the history of western thought. One of the most important philosophical texts ever written, it is also a masterclass in the ar
Theodore Levitt’s 1960 article “Marketing Myopia” is a business classic that earned its author the nickname “the father of modern marketing”. It is also a beautiful demonstration of the problem solvin
There are few better examples of analysis – the critical thinking skill of understanding how an argument is built – than Robert Dahl’s Democracy and its Critics. In this work, the American political t
Milton Friedman was one of the most influential economists of all time – and his ideas had a huge impact on the economic policies of governments across the world.A key theorist of capitalism and its r
Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics is one of the most influential texts of the 20th-century – an astonishing feat for what is, at heart, a series of deeply technical lectures about
Robert O. Keohane’s After Hegemony is both a classic of international relations scholarship and an example of how creative thinking can help shed new light on the world.Since the end of World War II,
Our Common Future, produced in 1987 by a United Nations commission, responded to a growing number of environmental concerns faced by the global community.
The modern vision of the world as one dominated by one or more superpowers begs the question of how best to understand the world-system that existed before the rise of the first modern powers.Janet Ab
Postmodernist thinkers consider history to be not very far removed from a work of fiction, something dependent on historians' own interpretations of the past. Evans, however, argues that we can trust
Michael E. Porter’s 1980 book Competitive Strategy is a fine example of critical thinking skills in action. Porter used his strong evaluative skills to overturn much of the accepted wisdom in the worl
Henry Kissinger’s 2014 book World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History not only offers a summary of thinking developed throughout a long and highly influential care
John Dower’s War Without Mercy is an attempt to resolve the problem of why the United States fought World War II so very differently in the Pacific and European theaters. Specifically, the author sets
Goldstone examines the causes of revolutions and uprisings between 1500 and 1800 in both Europe and Asia. Many thinkers previously believed that Europe's distinctive history-particularly the rise of c
