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 and, Bourdieu asserts, doesn't account for all observable nuances of behaviour.
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.
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.
The German sociologist Max Weber is considered to be one of the founding fathers of sociology, and ranks among the most influential writers of the 20th-century.
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.
Milton Friedman was one of the most influential economists of all time - and his ideas had a huge impact on the economic policies of governments across the world.
Herrnstein & Murray's The Bell Curve is a deeply controversial text that raises serious issues about the stakes involved in reasoning and interpretation.
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.
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.
The German sociologist Max Weber is considered to be one of the founding fathers of sociology, and ranks among the most influential writers of the 20th-century.
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.
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.
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.
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 construct.
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.
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.
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.
A critical analysis of Argyris's Integrating The Individual and the Organization, which forms part of a series of essays and books considering how organisations should be run.
Vision and Difference, published in 1988, is one of the most significant works in feminist visual culture arguing that feminist art history of is a political as well as academic endeavour.
A critical analysis of Argyris's Integrating The Individual and the Organization, which forms part of a series of essays and books considering how organisations should be run.
Roland Barthes's 1967 essay, "e;The Death of the Author,"e; argues against the traditional practice of incorporating the intentions and biographical context of an author into textual interpretation because of the resultant limitations imposed on a text.
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.
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;.
Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks is a remarkable work, not only because it was written in jail as the Italian Marxist thinker fell victim to political oppression in his home country, but also because it shows his impressive analytical ability.
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?
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.
A critical analysis of Centuries of Childhood, in which the French historian Philippe Aries offers a fundamentally fresh interpretation of what childhood is and what the institution means for society at large.
Brilliant and original, 'A Thousand Years of Good Prayers' introduces a remarkable first collection of stories about China from an author set to become a major literary talent.
