100 most influential books of all time

1998 | Martin Semoyr Smith

[Borges]

The I Ching. c. 1500 B.C.. The Old Testament. c. 1500 B.C.. Homer The Iliad. The Odyssey. 9th century B.C.. The Upanishads. c. 700-400 B.CE. Lao-Tzu The Way and Its Power. 3rd century B.C.. The Avesta. c. 500 B.C.. Confucius Analects. c. 5th-4th century B.C.. Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War. 5th century B.CE. Hippocrates Works. c. 400 B.C.. Aristotle Works. 4th century B.C. Herodotus History. 4th century B.C.. Plato The Republic. c. 380 B.C.. Euclid Elements. c. 280 B.C.. The Dhammapada. c. 252 B.C.. Virgil The Aeneid. 70-19 B.C.. Lucretius On the Nature of Reality. c. 55 B.C.. Philo of Alexandria Allegorical Expositions of the Holy Laws. 1st century The New Testament. c. 64-110 . Plutarch Lives. c. 50-120 . Cornelius Tacitus Annals, From the Death of the Divine Augustus. c.120 The Gospel of Truth (The Valentinian Speculation). c.1st century Marcus Aurelius Meditations. 167 C.E. Sextus Empiricus Outlines of Pyrrhonism. c. 150-210 Plotinus Enneads. 3d century Augustine of Hippo Confessions. c. 400. The Koran. 7th century . Moses Maimonides Guide for the Perplexed. 1190 The Kabbalah (Quabala). 12th century . Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae. 1266-1273 Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy. 1321 Desiderius Erasmus In Praise of Folly. 1509 Niccolo Machiavelli he Prince. 1532 Martin Luther On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church. 1520 Francois Rabelais Gargantua and Pantagruel. 1534, 1532. John Calvin Institutes of the Christian Religion. 1536 Nicolaus Copernicus On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs. 1543 Michel Eyquem de Montaigne Essays. 1580 Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote. Part I, 1605; Part II, 1615 Johannes Kepler The Harmony of the World. 1619 Francis Bacon Novum Organum. 1620 William Shakespeare The First Folio. 1623 Galileo Galilei Dialogue Concerning Two New Chief World Systems. 1632 Rene Desartes Discourse on Method. 1637 Thomas Hobbes Leviathan. 1651 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz Works. 1663-1716 Blaise Pascal Pensees. 1670 Baruch de Spinoza. Ethics. 1677 John Bunyan Pilgrim's Progress. 1678-1684 Isaac Newton Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. 1687 John Locke Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 1689 George Berkeley The Principles of Human Knowledge. 1740, rev 1734 Giambattista Vico The New Science. 1725, rev 1730, 1744 David Hume A Treatise of Human Nature. 1739-1740 Denis Diderot, ed. The Encyclopedia. 1751-1772 Samuel Johnson A Dictionary of the English Language. 1755 Francois-Marie de Voltaire Candide. 1759 Thomas Paine Common Sense. 1776 Adam Smith An Enquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 1776 Edward Gibbon The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 1776-87 Immanuel Kant Critique of Pure Reason. 1781 rev 1787 Jean-Jacques Rousseau Confessions. 1781 Edmund Burke Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1790 Mary Wollstonecraft Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 1792 William Godwin An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. 1793 Thomas Robert Malthus An Essay on the Principle of Population. 1798 rev 1803 George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Phenomenology of Spirit. 1807 Arnold Schopenhauer The World as Will and Idea. 1819 Auguste Comte Course in the Positivist Philosophy. 1830-1842 Carl Marie von Clausewitz On War. 1832 Soren Kierkegaard Either/Or. 1843 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels The Manifesto of the Communist Party. 1848 Henry David Thoreau Civil Disobedience. 1849 Charles Darwin The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. 1859 John Stuart Mill On Liberty. 1859 Herbert Spencer First Principles. 1862 Gregor Mendel "Experiments With Plant Hybrids." 1866 Leo Tolstoy War and Peace. 1868-1869 James Clerk Maxwell Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. 1873 Friedrich Nietzsche Thus Spake Zarathustra. 1883-1885 Sigmund Freud The Interpretation of Dreams. 1900 William James Pragmatism. 1908 Albert Einstein Relativity. 1916 Vilfredo Pareto The Mind and Society. 1916 Carl Gustav Jung Psychological Types. 1921 Martin Buber I and Thou. 1923 Franz Kafka The Trial. 1925 Karl Popper The Logic of Scientific Discovery. 1934 John Maynard Keynes The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. 1936 Jean-Paul Sartre Being and Nothingness. 1943 Friedrich von Hayek The Road to Serfdom. 1944 Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex. 1948 Norbert Wiener Cybernetics. 1948, rev 1961 George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-Four. 1949 George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson. 1950 Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations. 1953 Noam Chomsky Syntactic Structures. 1957 Thomas Samuel Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 1962 rev 1970 Betty Friedan The Feminine Mystique. 1963 Mao Zedong Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung. 1966 B. F. Skinner Beyond Freedom and Dignity. 1971

[Borges]

Don Quixote is generally thought to be the first modern novel in the western world. Fielding's Joseph Andrews predates Tom Jones and is framed as an attempt to do in English what Cervantes did in Spanish...create a 'comic epic in proise', it's the first English novel.

[headsonpikes]

Firstly, no I didn't know a movie had been derived from Gurdjieff's work - I'll bet it's 'remarkable'!

When I was introduced to Gurdjieff 30 years ago, it was after a ten-year immersion in Western analytic philosophy and modern history.

His metaphysical take on the world was so radically different from my own, yet suffused with Gurdjieff's compelling aand humane voice. It was a genuine glimpse into 'the other' for me.

Influential book? I doidn't think so, until now. ;^)

I can't say that many of his 20th Century picks deserve to be on such a list, and there are a few notable omissions in the earlier centuries.

I scanned the list by quintiles, and from the earliest, I had read substantial portions of all but 4,7,3,2,and 3 of the works listed. 19 all told unread. I'm not ashamed.

Amongst 20th C. writers, perhaps consideration could be given to the influential Mackinder and Mahan, Sorel, and it irks me to say - Lenin.

Spengler and McLuhan.....

I quit! ;^)

[Borges]

For those so inclined a related site has reproduced MSS's entire entry on Gurdjieff...


http://www.gurdjieff.org/G.2-3.htm

[headsonpikes]

Epictetus was one early omission which is included on your linked list. I agree with you that Mao, Friedan, and Skinner will be unread a century from now.

I pray, actually. ;^)

[Joe_October]

Art of War?

The Prince?

Certainly more influential them some mind games.

[Joe_October]

Mycroft,

Great post. My thought exactly regarding Art of War.

I was going to say I liked your tag line but it seemed to make me angry somehow.

October

[Billthedrill]

Not to be forgotten...

[Texican]

Borges:
W.E.B. Griffins, "The Corps" all seven books.

Have a good day, and the best to you and yours.

Semper Fi
Tommie

[headsonpikes]

And much else, besides - thanks!

[Joe_October]

...his attempt to create a true grammar and syntax for English that would replace the hodgepodge of Germanic and Latin grammatical paradigms was a brilliant effort...

Why would you bother?

[TET1968]

It seems to me the books by Rommel & Gudarian were pretty influential....in defeating Germany. :)

[headsonpikes]

If we're talking 'influential', you'd have to put Sam Clemens ahead of Dr. Seuss. ;^)

[VOA]

The books are being listed in chronological order, not in order of importance.

Honestly...
thank you for the info and your fair comment.

Believe it or not...my comment was motivated by a "toss aside" remark made by
a good man who made a terrible President of the USA, namely one Jimmy Carter.

As best I can recall from my childhood memory, Carter finally shot back during a
press conference (when even liberals realized they'd made a mistake by
putting Jimmy in office) that people were still risking their lives to get to the USA
and not leaving the USA for workers paradises such as the major communist countries.

I apologize for not giving you an exact quote, but that was just about the most
memorable quotation I can recollect from Carter's term.
Aside from his consultation with his daughter about nuclear proliferation.

[Billthedrill]

Excellent point. I agree with Victor Davis Hanson that Sun Tzu's Art of War was fairly obviously heavily edited and appended by persons who knew more about politics than combat. Machiavelli's Art Of War was read more by condotieri than anyone else. But it wasn't The Prince that was influential in the Renaissance, it was its companion volume Discourses On The First Ten Books Of Titus Livy, which is known simply as the Discourses these days and is seldom read because it isn't as sexy as The Prince and it presupposes a knowledge of Roman history that was common in Machiavelli's time but is not today. But it is here that the seminal ideas about the superiority of the Republic as a form of government are revived after nearly a millennium of slumber. His defense of faction is just about unprecedented and sounds hilarious in this time of political conventions in the U.S. - we laugh, but he was probably right.

[RightWingAtheist]

You both reminded me that Dewey's Democracy and Education should probably be considered, although the repercussions have been very mixed.

[headsonpikes]

Replace James with Dewey. ;^)

[Anitius Severinus Boethius]

Consolation of Philosophy is missing even from that list. Sad, it was widely regarded as one of the most important texts of the entire length of the Middle Ages.

[RightWingAtheist]

Just as people can't believe Shakespeare could have written all those plays, it's hard for some to believe that Einstein could have written three brilliant papers which completely revolutionalized physics, all published the same year when he was just twenty-six. In addition to crediting his first wife with some of alleged that he pilfered the great mathematician David Hilbert without credit. But historians going through his archived writings have found that he was working on his theories when he was only in his late teens, long before he met his first wife, or would have known of Hilbert, and have concluded that they were all indeed the work of a single (and singular) genius.

[Borges]

I once tried to google the 'Einstein stole his ideas' matter and the only info that came up was from Neo Nazi sites. So much for that matter.

[aMorePerfectUnion]

Candide? yeecchhhhh! Perhaps there were so few books of any kind that they had nothing worthy to read. I rank it in the pit with Thomas Mann's, The Magic Mountain. An equally lousy book. And yea, I suffered through both...

ampu