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 committed liberal, Hobson was deeply sceptical about the aims and claims of imperialistic thought at a time when Britain's empire held sway over a vast portion of the globe. In order to critique what he saw as a falsely reasoned and immoral political view, Hobson's book took a cuttingly analytical approach to the idea of imperialism - setting out to dissect and understand the arguments for empire before subjecting...

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. Often cited as the foundational work of modern conservative political thought, Burke's Reflections is a sustained argument against the French Revolution. Though Burke is in many ways not interested in rational close analysis of the arguments in favour of the revolution, he points out a crucial flaw in revolutionary thought, upon which he builds his argument. For Burke, that flaw was the sheer threat that...

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. In this work, the American political theorist closely analyzes the democratic political system and then evaluates whether the arguments that are in favor of it are, in fact, rigorous. Dahl sets out to describe democracy's merits and problems, asking if it really is the worthwhile political system we believe it to be. Knowing that the idea of democracy is now almost universally popular, his detailed analysis leads him to look at a...

The end of the Cold War, which occurred early in the 1990s, brought joy and freedom to millions. But it posed a difficult question to the world's governments and to the academics who studied them: how would world order be remade in an age no longer dominated by the competing ideologies of capitalism and communism? Samuel P. Huntington was one of the many political scientists who responded to this challenge by conceiving works that attempted to predict the ways in which conflict might play out in the 21st century, and in The Clash of Civilizations he suggested that a new kind of conflict, one...