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.
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.
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.
Haraway's 'A Cyborg Manifesto' is a key postmodern text and is widely taught in many disciplines as one of the first texts to embrace technology from a leftist and feminist perspective using the metaphor of the cyborg to champion socialist, postmodern, and anti-identitarian politics.
Leon Festinger's 1957 A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance is a key text in the history of psychology - one that made its author one of the most influential social psychologists of his time.
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.
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.
Kenneth Waltz's 1979 Theory of International Politics is credited with bringing about a "e;scientific revolution"e; in the study of international relations - bringing the field into a new era of systematic study.
Ikujiro Nonaka's A Dynamic Theory of Organisational Knowledge Creation outlines the creation of organisational knowledge through the constant conversion of the two types of knowledge, tacit and explicit, which Nonaka believes has the potential to guide managers' knowledge creation strategies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
David Hume's 1748 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is a modern philosophical classic that helped reshape epistemology - the philosophy of knowledge.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Soren Kierkegaard's The Sickness unto Death is widely recognized as one of the most significant and influential works of Christian philosophy written in the nineteenth century.
Febvre asked this core question in The Problem of Unbelief: "e;Could sixteenth-century people hold religious views that were not those of official, Church-sanctioned Christianity, or could they simply not believe at all?
