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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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
Benedict Anderson’s 1983 masterpiece Imagined Communities is a ground-breaking analysis of the origins and meanings of “nations” and “nationalism”.A book that helped reshape the field of nationalism s
Michel Foucault is famous as one of the 20th-century’s most innovative and wide-ranging thinkers. The qualities that made him one of the most-read and influential theorists of the modern age find full
Amartya Sen uses his 1999 work Development as Freedom to evaluate the processes and outcomes of economic development.Having come to the conclusion that development is best summed up as the expansion o
Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman’s 1974 paper ‘Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases’ is a landmark in the history of psychology. Though a mere seven pages long, it has helped reshape the
Published in 2010, Bloodlands argues that accounts of World War II have paid too much attention to the atrocities of Adolf Hitler, and not enough to Joseph Stalin's. Snyder believes a definitive histo
Thomas Paine’s 1791 Rights of Man is an impassioned political tract showing how the critical thinking skills of evaluation and reasoning can, and must, be applied to contentious issues.Divided into tw
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
One of the primary qualities of good creative thinking is an intellectual freedom to think outside of the box. Good creative thinkers resist orthodox ideas, take new lines of enquiry, and generally co
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
Originally published in 1866, Civil Disobedience asks when - and in what circumstances - an individual should actively oppose government and its justice system. Thoreau's argument is that opposition i
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
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
John P. Kotter’s Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail is a classic of business literature, and an example of high-level analysis and evaluation.In critical thinking, analysis is all about t
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
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
An important Marxist work, Prison Notebooks (1948) argues that we must understand societies both in terms of their economic relationships and their cultural beliefs.
One criticism of history is that historians all too often study it in isolation, failing to take advantage of models and evidence from scholars in other disciplines. This is not a charge that can be l
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
