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...

How should rulers rule? What is the nature of power? These questions had already been asked when Niccolo Machiavelli wrote The Prince in 1513. But what made his thinking on the topic different was his ability to interpret evidence: to look at old issues and find new meaning within them. Many of Machiavelli's contemporaries thought that God would make sure morality was rewarded. To these people, it was inevitable that ethical individuals would enjoy success in this world and attain paradise in the next. Machiavelli was not so sure. He used the evidence of history to prove that people who...