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.
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.
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.
Central to the creative process of the Romantic poets that followed him, Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads has been both a gift and a thorn in the side of critics for over a century.
How was it possible for opponents of slavery to be so vocal in opposing the practice, when they were so accepting of the economic exploitation of workers in western factories - many of which were owned by prominent abolitionists?
Dynamic Capabilities and Strategic Management is a pioneering book in business studies, one of the most succinct and in-depth examinations of dynamic capabilities, explaining both their foundations and the strategic implications they hold for both academics and practitioners in the field of business strategy, innovation, entrepreneurship and economics.
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.
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.
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.
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.
With his 1954 book The Nature of Prejudice, American psychologist Gordon Allport displays the crucial skill of reasoning, producing and organizing an argument that was persuasive enough to have a major impact not only in universities, but also on government policy.
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?
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?
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.
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;.
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.
Paul Kennedy owes a great deal to the editor who persuaded him to add a final chapter to this study of the factors that contributed to the rise and fall of European powers since the age of Spain's Philip II.
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.
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.
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.
On Religion is a major text for the development of modern religious thought in the West and its author, German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, is remembered as the Father of Modern Protestant Theology, as well as for his contributions to philosophy, ethics and hermeneutics.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
