Literary theory

There is arguably no more famous book about the arts of interpretation and analysis than Sigmund Freud's 1899 Interpretation of Dreams.

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 he outlined in The Interpretation of Cultures.

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.

What makes a good manager?

Hannah Arendt's 1958 The Human Condition was an impassioned philosophical reconsideration of the goals of being human.

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 works of history, but also the departure point from which the modern discipline of international relations has been built.

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, specifically in the face-off between NATO and the Warsaw Pact in Europe.

Marcel Mauss's 1925 essay The Gift is an enduring classic of sociological and anthropological analysis by a thinker who is one of the founding fathers of modern anthropology.

John Maynard Keynes's 1936 General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money is a perfect example of the global power of critical thinking.

Perhaps no work of history written in the 20th century has done more to undermine an existing consensus and cause its readers to re-evaluate their own preconceptions than has Jonathan Riley-Smith's revisionist account of the motives of the first crusaders.

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.

The 85 essays that maker up The Federalist Papers' clearly demonstrate the vital importance of the art of persuasion.

David Hume's 1748 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is a modern philosophical classic that helped reshape epistemology - the philosophy of knowledge.

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.

Despite having no formal training in urban planning, Jane Jacobs deftly explores the strengths and weaknesses of policy arguments put forward by American urban planners in the era after World War II.

For many centuries, the history of the crusades, as written by Western historians, was based solidly on Western sources.

C.

Gilbert Ryle's 1949 The Concept of Mind is now famous above all as the origin of the phrase "e;the ghost in the machine"e; - a phrase Ryle used to attack the popular idea that our bodies and minds are separate.

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.

The end of the Cold War, which occurred early in the 1990s, brought joy and freedom to millions.

One of the primary qualities of good creative thinking is an intellectual freedom to think outside of the box.

Reasoning is the critical thinking skill concerned with the production of arguments: making them coherent, consistent, and well-supported; and responding to opposing positions where necessary.

Herrnstein & Murray's The Bell Curve is a deeply controversial text that raises serious issues about the stakes involved in reasoning and interpretation.

Sun Tzu's The Art of War is a series of lessons in the applied art of problem solving.

The Anti-Politics Machine (1990) examines how international development projects are conceived, researched, and put into practice.

C.

Plato's Symposium, composed in the early fourth century BC, demonstrates how powerful the skills of reasoning and evaluation can be.

Claude Levi-Strauss is probably the most complex anthropological theorist of all time.

Many people want to understand what revolutions are and - especially - how they come about, from the academics who study them to the states that wish to prevent (or, in some cases, provoke) them.

Rachel Carson's 1962 Silent Spring is one of the few books that can claim to be epoch-making.

The Rule of St Benedict, written around 1500 years ago by the Italian monk St Benedict of Nursia, is a slim handbook for monastic life - a subject many modern readers would regard as relatively niche.

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.

Understanding why revolutions take place when they do, and as they do, is important in itself.

The eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant is as daunting as he is influential: widely considered to be not only one of the most challenging thinkers of all time, but also one of the most important.

Edmund Burke's 1791 Reflections on the Revolution in France is a strong example of how the thinking skills of analysis and reasoning can support even the most rhetorical of arguments.

What is the ultimate goal of any human society?

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 career-it is also an intervention in international relations theory by one of the most famous statesmen of the twentieth century.

The work of memory researchers Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch is a prime example of the ways in which good critical thinkers approach questions and the problems they raise.

The history of anthropology is, to a large extent, the history of differing modes of interpretation.

Franz Boas's 1940 Race, Language and Culture is a monumentally important text in the history of its discipline, collecting the articles and essays that helped make Boas known as the 'father of American anthropology.

The impact of William James's 1890 The Principles of Psychology is such that he is commonly known as the father of his subject.

German sociologist Max Weber's 1919 lecture Politics as a Vocation is widely regarded as a masterpiece of political theory and sociology.

Hans Morgenthau's Politics Among Nations is a classic of political science, built on the firm foundation of Morgenthau's watertight reasoning skills.

Aristotle remains one of the most celebrated thinkers of all time in large part thanks to his incisive critical thinking skills.

Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is a seminal piece of literary criticism, and a masterclass in the critical thinking skill of interpretation.

Many still consider Ludwig Wittgenstein's 1953 Philosophical Investigations to be one of the breakthrough works of twentieth-century philosophy.

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.

Our Common Future is a joint work produced in 1987 by a United Nations commission headed by former Norwegian Prime Minister, Gro Brundtland.

Edward Said's Orientalism is a masterclass in the art of interpretation wedded to close analysis.

Charles Darwin called on a broad and unusually powerful combination of critical thinking skills to create his wide-ranging explanation for biological change, On the Origin of Species.