American author, journalist, and activist Jane Jacobs was born in 1916 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. She moved to New York City in 1934, where she became a journalist, writing for magazines including Architectural Forum and Fortune.

Abu-Lughod's portrait of a more balanced world is a masterpiece of synthesis driven by one highly creative idea: her world system of interlocking spheres of influence quite literally connected masses of evidence together in new ways. A triumph of fine critical thinking.

Winner of the 1998 Pulitzer, Guns, Germs, and Steel attempts to answer why human history unfolded differently on different continents.

Few people can claim to have had minds as fertile and creative as the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. One of the most influential political theorists of the modern age, he was also a composer, writer of opera, a novelist, and a memoirist.

Nineteenth century American politician John C. Calhoun was unashamedly pro-slavery. So it may seem strange that his 1850 text, intended to defend that practice, is so respected today and Calhoun's vision later helped civil rights activists create a fairer democratic system.

One of the most significant works of political philosophy, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859) defines and defends individual liberty, a cornerstone of classical liberal thinking.

Butler's 1990 work shook the foundations of feminist theory and changed the conversation about gender. While many thinkers already accepted that "gender" was a category constructed by society defined by one's genitalia, Butler went further and argued that gender is performative-it exists only in the acts that express it.

A critical analysis of Karl Marx's Capital. Controversial and passionately debated to this day, it is nonetheless a fine example of the creative combination of a philosophical method (the dialectic) with historical and economic information to produce a new interpretation of history.

In Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein presents a radical approach to the philosophy of language and the mind, setting out a startlingly fresh conception of philosophy itself. Wittgenstein begins from the insight that most philosophical problems trace back to incorrect assumptions about the nature of language.

Considered his most important work, Mahbub ul Haq's Reflections on Human Development appeared at the end of his career in international development, and consolidates his revolutionary contribution to the discipline.