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An Analysis of Thomas Paine's Common Sense

An Analysis of Thomas Paine's Common Sense

Thomas Paine’s 1776 Common Sense has secured an unshakeable place as one of history’s most explosive and revolutionary books. A slim pamphlet published at the beginning of the American Revolution it was so widely read that it remains the all-time best selling book in US history. An impassioned argument for American independence and for democratic government Common Sense can claim to have helped change the face of the world more than almost any other book. But Paine’s pamphlet is also a masterclass in critical thinking demonstrating how the reasoned construction of arguments can be reinforced by literary skill and passion. Paine is perhaps more famous as a stylist than as a constructor of arguments but Common Sense marries the best elements of good reasoning to its polemic. Moving systematically from the origins of government through a criticism of monarchy and on to the possibilities for future democratic government in an independent America Paine neatly lays out a series of persuasive reasons to fight for independence and a new form of government. Indeed as the pamphlet’s title suggested to do so was nothing more than ‘common sense. ’ | An Analysis of Thomas Paine's Common Sense

GBP 6.50
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An Analysis of Mahmood Mamdani's Citizen and Subject Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism

An Analysis of Mahmood Mamdani's Citizen and Subject Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism

Mahmood Mamdani’s 1996 Citizen and Subject is a powerful work of analysis that lays bare the sources of the problems that plagued and often still plague African governments. Analysis is one of the broadest and most fundamental critical thinking skills and involves understanding the structure and features of arguments. Mamdani’s strong analytical skills form the basis of an original investigation of the problems faced by the independent African governments in the wake of the collapse of the colonial regimes imposed by European powers such has Great Britain and France. It had long been clear that these newly-independent governments faced many problems – corruption the imposition of anti-democratic rule and many basic failures of day-to-day governance. They also tended to replicate many of the racially and ethnically prejudiced structures that were part of colonial rule. Mamdani analyses the many arguments about the sources of these problems drawing out their hidden implications and assumptions in order to clear the way for his own creative new vision of the way to overcome the obstacles to democratization in Africa. A dense and brilliant analysis of the true nature of colonialism’s legacy in Africa Mamdani’s book remains influential to this day. | An Analysis of Mahmood Mamdani's Citizen and Subject Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism

GBP 6.50
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An Analysis of St. Augustine's Confessions

An Analysis of St. Augustine's Confessions

St. Augustine’s Confessions is one of the most important works in the history of literature and Christian thought. Written around 397 when Augustine was the Christian bishop of Hippo (in modern-day Algeria) the Confessions were designed both to spiritually educate those who already shared Augustine’s faith and to convert those who did not. Augustine did this through the original maneuver of writing what is now recognized as being the first Western autobiography – letting readers share in his own experiences of youth sin and eventual conversion. The Confessions are a perfect example of using reasoning to subtly bring readers around to a particular point of view – with Augustine inviting them to accompany him on his own spiritual journey towards God so they could make their own conversion. Carefully structured the Confessions run from describing the first 43 years of Augustine’s life in North Africa and Italy to discussing the nature of memory before moving on to analyzing the Bible itself. In order the sections form a carefully structured argument moving from the personal to the philosophical to the contemplative. In the hundreds of years since they were first published they have persuaded hundreds of thousands of readers to recognize towards the same God that Augustine himself worshipped. | An Analysis of St. Augustine's Confessions

GBP 6.50
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An Analysis of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's Can the Subaltern Speak?

An Analysis of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's Can the Subaltern Speak?

A critical analysis of Spivak's classic 1988 postcolonial studies essay in which she argues that a core problem for the poorest and most marginalized in society (the subalterns) is that they have no platform to express their concerns and no voice to affect policy debates or demand a fairer share of society’s goods. A key theme of Gayatri Spivak's work is agency: the ability of the individual to make their own decisions. While Spivak's main aim is to consider ways in which subalterns – her term for the indigenous dispossessed in colonial societies – were able to achieve agency this paper concentrates specifically on describing the ways in which western scholars inadvertently reproduce hegemonic structures in their work. Spivak is herself a scholar and she remains acutely aware of the difficulty and dangers of presuming to speak for the subalterns she writes about. As such her work can be seen as predominantly a delicate exercise in the critical thinking skill of interpretation; she looks in detail at issues of meaning specifically at the real meaning of the available evidence and her paper is an attempt not only to highlight problems of definition but to clarify them. What makes this one of the key works of interpretation in the Macat library is of course the underlying significance of this work. Interpretation in this case is a matter of the difference between allowing subalterns to speak for themselves and of imposing a mode of speaking on them that – however well-intentioned – can be as damaging in the postcolonial world as the agency-stifling political structures of the colonial world itself. By clearing away the detritus of scholarly attempts at interpretation Spivak takes a stand against a specifically intellectual form of oppression and marginalization. | An Analysis of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's Can the Subaltern Speak?

GBP 6.50
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An Analysis of Geoffrey Parker's Global Crisis War Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century

An Analysis of Geoffrey Parker's Global Crisis War Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century

Few historians can claim to have undertaken historical analysis on as grand a scale as Geoffrey Parker in his 2013 work Global Crisis: War Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century. It is a doorstop of a book that surveys the ‘general crisis of the 17th century ’ shows that it was experienced practically throughout the world and was not merely a European phenomenon and links it to the impact of climate change in the form of the advent of a cold period known as the ‘Little Ice Age. ’ Parker’s triumph is made possible by the deployment of formidable critical thinking skills – reasoning to construct an engaging overall argument from very disparate material and analysis to re-examine and understand the plethora of complex secondary sources on which his book is built. In critical thinking analysis is all about understanding the features and structures of argument: how given reasons lead to conclusions and what kinds of implicit reasons and assumptions are being used. Historical analysis applies the same skills to the fabric of history asking how given chains of events occur how different reasons and factors interact and so on. Parker though takes things further than most in his quest to understand the meaning of a century’s-worth of turbulence spread across the whole globe. Beginning by breaking down the evidence for significant climatic cooling in the 17th-century (due to decreased solar activity) he moves on to detailed study of the effects the cooling had on societies and regimes across the world. From this detailed spadework he constructs a persuasive argument that accounts for the different ways in which the effects of climate change played out across the century – an argument with profound implications for a future likely to see serious climate change of its own. | An Analysis of Geoffrey Parker's Global Crisis War Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century

GBP 6.50
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