An analysis

Francis Fukuyama?s controversial 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man demonstrates an important aspect of creative thinking: the ability to generate hypotheses and create novel explanations for evidence. In the…

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 and politics. Within a…

How was the Soviet Union like a soup kitchen? In this important and highly revisionist work, historian Sheila Fitzpatrick explains that a reimagining of the Communist state as a provider of goods for the ?deserving poor?…

Debt is one of the great subjects of our day, and understanding the way that it not only fuels economic growth, but can also be used as a means of generating profit and exerting control, is central to grasping the way in…

Michel Foucault is famous as one of the 20th-century?s most innovative thinkers ? and his work on Discipline and Punish was so original and offered models so useful to other scholars that the book now ranks among the…

No philosopher could be a better example of creative thinking in action than Friedrich Nietzsche: a German iconoclast who systematically attacked the traditionally accepted views of academic philosophers, seeking to tear…

Michael R. Gottfredson and Travish Hirschi?s 1990 A General Theory of Crime is a classic text that helped reshape the discipline of criminology. It is also a testament to the powers of clear reasoning and interpretation.…

How was it possible for opponents of slavery to be so vocal in opposing the practice, when they were so accepting of the economic exploitation of workers in western factories ? many of which were owned by prominent…

Understanding evidence is critical in a court of law ? and it is just as important for critical thinking. Elizabeth Loftus, a pioneering psychologist, made a landmark contribution to both these areas in Eyewitness…

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 to income and wealth…

Clifford Geertz has been called ?the most original anthropologist of his generation? ? and this reputation rests largely on the huge contributions to the methodology and approaches of anthropological interpretation that…

In The Night Battles, Carlo Ginzburg does more than introduce his readers to a novel group of supposed witches ? the Benandanti, from the northern Italian province of Friulia. He also invents and deploys new and creative…

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 the sequence and…

American political scientist Robert Putnam wasn?t the first person to recognize that social capital ? the relationships between people that allow communities to function well ? is the grease that oils the wheels of…

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 philosophical…

For those who lived through the Cold War period, and for many of the historians who study it, it seemed self-evident that the critical incidents that determined its course took place in the northern hemisphere,…

The 85 essays that maker up The Federalist Papers? clearly demonstrate the vital importance of the art of persuasion. Written between 1787 and 1788 by three of the ?Founding Fathers? of the United States, the Papers were…

Kenneth Waltz?s 1979 Theory of International Politics is credited with bringing about a ?scientific revolution? in the study of international relations ? bringing the field into a new era of systematic study. The book is…

How should rulers rule? What is the nature of power? These questions had already been asked when Niccolò Machiavelli wrote The Prince in 1513. But what made his thinking on the topic different was his ability to…

Our Common Future is a joint work produced in 1987 by a United Nations commission headed by former Norwegian Prime Minister, Gro Brundtland. Also known as The Brundtland Report, it offers a classic approach to problem…

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 old ones in the light…

Saba Mahmood?s 2005 Politics of Piety is an excellent example of evaluation in action. Mahmood?s book is a study of women?s participation in the Islamic revival across the Middle East. Mahmood ? a feminist social…

Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique is possibly the best-selling of all the titles analysed in the Macat library, and arguably one of the most important. Yet it was the product of an apparently minor, meaningless…

In Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau looks at old issues in new ways, asking: is there ever a time when individuals should actively oppose their government and its justice system? After a thorough review of the…

Adam Smith?s 1776 Inquiry into The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations ? more often known simply as The Wealth of Nations ? is one of the most important books in modern intellectual history. Considered one of the…

Historians of the American Revolution had always seen the struggle for independence either as a conflict sparked by heavyweight ideology, or as a war between opposing social groups acting out of self-interest. In The…

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 studies, Imagined…

In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, neurologist Oliver Sacks looked at the cutting-edge work taking place in his field, and decided that much of it was not fit for purpose. Sacks found it hard to understand why…

This unique appraisal of the famous Swiss architect's major works have now been expanded to include two more buildings. The Villa Shodhan and the Pavilion Suisse round out the coverage of Le Corbusier's significant…

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 feminism, the book is a…

An Analysis of Marijuana Policy

What caused the rise of Chicago, and how did the city's expansion fuel the westward movement of the American frontier - and influence the type of society that evolved as a result? Nature's Metropolis emerged as a result…

Thomas Hobbes is a towering figure in the history of modern thought and political philosophy. He remains best remembered for his 1651 treatise on government, Leviathan, a work that shows at the very best the reasoning…

C.S. Lewis?s Mere Christianity is a perfect example of one of the most effective aspects of critical thinking skills: the use of reasoning to build a strong, logical argument. ¶Lewis originally wrote the book as a series…

Robert Lucas is known among economists as one of the most influential macroeconomists of recent times - a reputation founded in no small part on the critical thinking skills displayed in his seminal 1990 paper 'Why…

In Outline of a Theory of Practice , Bourdieu questions the preeminent ideas of social anthropologists such as Levi-Strauss who stressed the structural principles governing human action rather than the actions themselves…