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 Doesn't Capital Flow from Rich to Poor Countries?
Few works of history have succeeded so completely in forcing their readers to take a fresh look at the evidence as Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down - and that achievement is rooted firmly in Hill's exceptional problem-solving skills.
Eric Hoffer's The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements is one of the most widely read works of social psychology written in the 20th-century.
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.
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.
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.
In The Rights of Others, Benhabib argues that the transnational movement of people across the globe has brought to the fore fundamental dilemmas facing liberal democracies: tension between a state's commitment to universal human rights, and to its sovereign self-determination and its claims to regulate its national borders on the other.
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.
David Hume's 1748 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is a modern philosophical classic that helped reshape epistemology - the philosophy of knowledge.
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 of new evidence that began emerging from behind the Iron Curtain after 1990.
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.
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.
Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is an unflinching dissection of the racial biases built into the American prison system.
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.
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.
William Whyte's core idea in The Organization Man is that the Protestant Ethic that characterized financial and personal success in American history had been replaced in modern times by the Social Ethic.
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.
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 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.
Ludwig Von Mises's 1912 contribution to the theory of monetary policy and the current prevailing consensus in modern economic liberalism, The Theory of Money and Credit, was a milestone achievement.
David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd: A Study in the Changing American Character is one of the best-known books in the history of sociology - holding a mirror up to contemporary America and showing the nation its own character as it had never seen it before.
Tabbaa's Transformation offers an innovative approach to understanding the profound changes undergone by Islamic art and architecture during the often neglected Medieval Islamic period.
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.
Social anthropologist Jean Lave and computer scientist Etienne Wenger's seminal Situated Learning helped change the fields of cognitive science and pedagogy by approaching learning from a novel angle.
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.
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.
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.
David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd: A Study in the Changing American Character is one of the best-known books in the history of sociology - holding a mirror up to contemporary America and showing the nation its own character as it had never seen it before.
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.
Wright's The New Testament and the People of God is the first volume of his acclaimed series 'Christian Origins and the Question of God' comprehensively addressing the historical and theological questions surrounding the origins of Christianity.
