Literary theory

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?

Mythologies is a masterpiece of analysis and interpretation.

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 of our times: globalization.

Elizabeth Anscombe's 1958 essay "e;Modern Moral Philosophy"e; is a cutting intervention in modern philosophy that shows the full power of good evaluative and analytical critical thinking skills.

Aristotle's Metaphysics is a collection of essays on a wide range of topics, almost certainly never put together by Aristotle himself.

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Rene Descartes's 1641 Meditations on First Philosophy is a cornerstone of the history of western thought.

Theodore Levitt's 1960 article "e;Marketing Myopia"e; is a business classic that earned its author the nickname "e;the father of modern marketing"e;.

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 inside it to grasp the seriousness of their predicament.

Liquidated is a work of anthropology that treats an unusual, despised subculture - that of the Wall Street banker - much as anthropologists have traditionally treated remote 'savage' tribes.

Thomas Hobbes is a towering figure in the history of modern thought and political philosophy.

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South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang used his 2003 work Kicking Away The Ladder to challenge the central orthodoxies of development economics, using his creative thinking skills to shine new light on an old topic.

Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman's 1974 paper 'Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases' is a landmark in the history of psychology.

For 2,000 years, the standard philosophical model of knowledge was that it could be defined as a justified true belief.

Hamid Dabashi's 2007 Iran: A People Interrupted is simultaneously subtle, passionate, polarizing and polemical.

English economist John Hobson's 1902 Imperialism: A Study was an epoch-making study of the politics and economics of imperialism that shook imperialist beliefs to their core.

Benedict Anderson's 1983 masterpiece Imagined Communities is a ground-breaking analysis of the origins and meanings of "e;nations"e; and "e;nationalism"e;.

Michel Foucault is famous as one of the 20th-century's most innovative and wide-ranging thinkers.

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 so differently in various parts of the globe.

Judith Butler's Gender Trouble is a perfect example of creative thinking.

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.

Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard's 1843 book Fear and Trembling shows precisely why he is regarded as one of the most significant and creative philosophers of the nineteenth century.

Understanding evidence is critical in a court of law - and it is just as important for critical thinking.

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 most influential academic works ever published.

David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is a philosophical classic that displays a powerful mastery of the critical thinking skills of reasoning and evaluation.

Amartya Sen uses his 1999 work Development as Freedom to evaluate the processes and outcomes of economic development.

Alexis de Tocqueville's 1838 Democracy in America is a classic of political theory - and of the problem-solving skills central to putting forward political ideas.

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.

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 which our society really works.

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.

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 the structure of human languages.

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Thomas Paine's 1776 Common Sense has secured an unshakeable place as one of history's most explosive and revolutionary books.

American scholar Jared Diamond deploys his powers of interpretation to great effect in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, which seeks to understand the meaning behind the available evidence describing societies that have survived and those that have withered and died.

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?

A critical analysis of David C.

A critical analysis of African-American novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston' 1934 essay Characteristics of Negro Expression: A crushing evaluation of the many racial prejudices of 1930s America, including a common presumption that African American art was unoriginal - merely poorly copying white culture.

Milton Friedman was arguably the single most influential economist of the 20th-century.

Thomas Piketty is a fine example of an evaluative thinker.

A critical analysis of Karl Marx's Capital, which is without question one of the most influential books to be published in the course of the past two centuries.

A critical analysis of Spivak's classic 1988 postcolonial studies essay, in which she argues that a core problem for the poorest and most marginalized in society (the subalterns) is that they have no platform to express their concerns and no voice to affect policy debates or demand a fairer share of society's goods.

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 society.

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Frantz Fanon's explosive Black Skin, White Masks is a merciless expose of the psychological damage done by colonial rule across the world.

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 down their rickety platform and replace it with a platform of his own.

Thomas Robert Malthus' 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population helped change the direction of economics, politics, and the natural sciences with its reasoning and problem solving.

Why is it that children from disadvantaged backgrounds find it so difficult - and often impossible - to achieve?

Albert Bandura is the most cited living psychologist, and is regularly named as one of the most influential figures ever to have worked in his field.