Wyniki wyszukiwania:

Martin Luther King’s policy of non-violent protest in the struggle for civil rights in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century led to fundamental shifts in American government policy relating to segregation, and a cultural shift in the treatment of African Americans. King’s 1964 book Why We Can’t Wait creates strong, well-structured arguments as to why he and his followers chose to wage a nonviolent struggle in the fight to advance freedom and equality for black people following ‘three hundred years of humiliation, abuse, and deprivation.’...

Benedict Anderson’s 1983 masterpiece Imagined Communities is a ground-breaking analysis of the origins and meanings of “nations” and “nationalism”.

A book that helped reshape the field of nationalism studies, Imagined Communities also shows the critical thinking skills of interpretation and analysis working at their highest levels. One crucial aspect of Anderson’s work involves the apparently simple act of defining precisely what we mean when we say ‘nation’ or ‘nationalism’ – an interpretative step that is vital to the analysis he proceeds...

The 85 essays that maker up The Federalist Papers’ clearly demonstrate the vital importance of the art of persuasion. Written between 1787 and 1788 by three of the “Founding Fathers” of the United States, the Papers were written with the specific intention of convincing Americans that it was in their interest to back the creation of a strong national government, enshrined in a constitution – and they played a major role in deciding the debate between proponents of a federal state, with its government based on central institutions housed in a single capital, and the...

Thomas Hobbes is a towering figure in the history of modern thought and political philosophy. He remains best remembered for his 1651 treatise on government, Leviathan, a work that shows at the very best the reasoning skills of a deeply original and creative thinker.

Creative thinking is all about taking a novel approach to questions and problems – showing them in a new light. When Hobbes was writing Leviathan, the standard approach to understanding (and advocating for) monarchical government was to argue, using Christian theology, that kings and queens gained their...

German sociologist Max Weber’s 1919 lecture Politics as a Vocation is widely regarded as a masterpiece of political theory and sociology. Its central strength lies in Weber’s deployment of masterful interpretative skills to power his discussion of modern politics.

Interpretation involves understanding both the meaning of evidence and the meaning of terms – questioning definitions, clarifying terms and processes, and supplying good, clear definitions of the author’s own. As a sociologist accustomed to working with historical evidence, Weber based his own work on...

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.

First published in 1948, 11 years after Gramsci’s death, Prison Notebooks ably demonstrates that the writer has an innate ability to understand the relationship between different parts of an argument. This is how Gramsci manages to analyze such wide-ranging topics – capitalism, economics and culture – to explain...