Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries

Human Events Online ^ | May 31, 2005 | Human Events

[hinterlander]

HUMAN EVENTS asked a panel of 15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders to help us compile a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Each panelist nominated a number of titles and then voted on a ballot including all books nominated. A title received a score of 10 points for being listed No. 1 by one of our panelists, 9 points for being listed No. 2, etc. Appropriately, The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, earned the highest aggregate score and the No. 1 listing.

[tiamat]

I was beginning to wonder when the book-burning rally was.

;-)

On a serious note: the very minute things like Marx and Hitler and Mao and all of the others mentioned get banned, suppresed or proscribed, is the minute we begin to FORGET what these authors stand for, and THAT is the very minute. when some painful history begins to repeat itself.
This sort of thought-control has been tried before, and it has NEVER worked.

This is not to say we should allow our children access to just anythng at all: there are CDs and tv shows and video games and yes, books, that I do not allow my daughter to see..

However I also believe in personal responsibility, including personal responsibility for the future. I make it a POINT to collect banned books and "subversive literature" because I want an historical record amongst other things.

Then there is this: depending on how thngs go, I may SOMEDAY actually REQUIRE my daughter to read some of these books.

Know thine enemy.

[unbalanced but fair]

Very well put. Thank you.

[CarolinaGuitarman]

"The Neitzschean "superman"?"

I don't think Hitler ever read him. Besides, the Nazis completely misused Nietzsche as they did with everything they *adopted*. The Will to Power was a book that was strung together by Nietzsche's sister from notes he had. It was she who promoted him as a proto-nazi. In reality he was virulently opposed to antisemitism and nationalism. That's a large reason why he fell out with Richard Wagner. He also had a low opinion of the German people and hardly saw them as a super-race. He thought the idea of *pure blood* was a destructive force.

Heidegger could not have built on Nietzsche in the way you suggest because as you see, Nietzsche was anything but a Nazi.

[inquest]

Some of the conservative thinkers polled in this exercise are probably within the Bennett camp and would see "On Liberty" as dangerous.

I've done some Googling around and I've found that a number of commentators have construed his writings as advocating full license for all manner of private sexual deviancy. But since he never came out and said that, and since his book would have been resoundingly denounced if he had, I'd say that a lot of his comments were taken out of context by modern libertarians. Apparently, modern social conservatives like Bennett and Bork have done the same.

[WOSG]

"Harmful books? No. No harmful books. Harmful people."

Ah, really, ideas and books had *nothing* to do with the 100 million killed by communism, the 40 million killed by WWII that Hitler (author of Mein Kampf) started? Ideas are all 'okay' no matter the consequences of the actions of those who believe those ideas? ...

sounds like you were raised on bad book #5 ....

"#5. Democracy and Education
Author: John Dewey
Publication date: 1916
Score: 36"

[corkoman]

Since Darwin introduced a major ideological shift in man's view about himself, changing it from special creation of God to descendent of apes and nothing more than an animal whose sole purpose was reproduction, it is arguable that his books were hugely harmful.

Darwin did not say man came from apes. Even if he did, who made the Apes? God did. And who here can say that God is not capable of instilling within His creation the ability to adapt by changes in allelles?

Alls Darwin did is propose that by natural selection those who have mutations that provide a reproductive benefit are likely to thrive, passing on that phenotype.

Is this as harmful as murdering millions of people in concentration camps? Please respond to that question.

[headsonpikes]

I'd have kept Auguste Comte off the list. Sociology has had its distortions, but ...

Comte was first to apply materialistic reduction to all elements of human society in detail.

That foolish fancy, 'positivism', is the root cause of present day social breakdown induced by 'social democracy' and the 'welfare' state, or any other variant of 'progressive', 'modern' thought that seeks to 'improve' humankind..

[JohnnyZ]

The Nazis loved Wagner, too, so his music must be bad.

Wagner's philosophy was most certainly bad, and I believe it is expressed to some extent in his music. That doesn't mean he wasn't a genius though.

[Buzzcook]

"I would put him on the list for his philosophical Utilitarianism and Nominalism, which laid the groundwork for our society's intellectual and moral relativism."

Utilitarianism was Jeremy Bentham and Nominalism goes back to Epicuris if not further.

Stuart was a mini-me to Bentham and then he met a girl. That kinda changed his outlook on the "purely intellectual".

Oddly enough in Mill's only work on Utiliarianism he set himself up against Emmanual Kant the bete noir of some folks here.

[BikerNYC]

Ideas are all 'okay' no matter the consequences of the actions of those who believe those ideas? ...

You sound like the kind of person who believe that guns should be restricted because they kill people, as opposed to believing that we should punish those who use guns unlawfully.

Blame the horrors you speak of, not on books or ideas, but on people who read books and have taken from those books whatever they felt was necessary to justify their actions.

Karl Marx is no more responsible for the killing committed by Stalin than are the authors of the Bible responsible for the killing during the Crusades.

People harm, books do not, and it is an abdication of personal responsibility to think otherwise.

[SittinYonder]

Vile ideas in some of those books, to be sure. But harmful?

I tend to think that the vile ideas in those books (at least some of them) have caused real harm. I wouldn't suggest banning them or burning them, but quite often the end result is that when people pick up those books and start acting out those vile ideas, rather than a book getting burned, people (often thousands or hundreds of thousands) get killed.

[Bella_Bru]

So you are ok with the liberals acalling any books that are clearly pro-USA as harmful, right? Or are the only books that are "harmful" the ones disliked on FR?

[Celtjew Libertarian]

I'll quibble on the phrase "forced to be read." Outside of that, excellent post.

[WOSG]

"Personally I would place Origin of the Species at number 1. Certainly neither Marx, nor Hitler's books would have had the philosophical underpinnings they did except for Darwin's efforts."

I completely disagree.

In Marx's case, there is no connection and moreover, his work (Communist manisfesto) was published *before* Darwin, and rested on completely different foundations (errors about labor theory of value, German Hegelian philosophy and a very *unDarwinian* theory of history and economics).

I personally think Freud's work should have been on the list and Darwin's work off it.

If you want to see Darwin's real influence on economics, look at "Bio-nomics", a very good book that explains economic behavior and change in organic ways and which 'rescues' classical economics from the errors of 'equilibrium' economics.

Darwin has been influential and controversial, but not negative. Accusing Darwin of something bad because of the work of others is like saying Einstein's 'relativity' is some how responsible for moral relativism (they have nothing to do with eachother).

Marx and Freud otoh have been *proven wrong* and yet their work has influenced leftist scholars even up to today. Freud in particular, attacked traditional morality by positing dangers in the interactions with children by parents, assuming there is some 'repressed' urges, and wrongly concocting meanings in dreams. Wrong. Schizophrenia, we now know is brain chemical imbalances, not due to how you were potty-trained, etc. Freudian analysis was a fraud, helped only by the fact that every mentally imbalance person is helped by at least being aware of their emotions and impulses, but harmed by the phony Freudian assumptions built on how to change behavior. But what has made Freud harmful really is not how he retarded/distorted brain science, but how leftwing philosophers have used his ideas to apply it to societies, and assume that (a) ancient ills have effects today, and (b) people repress true immoral desires and 'repressing' such impulses is unhealthy.

In other words, phony science in the service of deconstructing morality.

... that is a constant theme of these 'bad books', they challenged the orthodoxy with a 'bright idea' that turned out later to be a hoax: Kinsey, Margaret Mead, Freud, etc. Same story different topic. Those hoexes in turn was used to get moraliy undermined.

[GodBlessRonaldReagan]

Three generations of imbeciles are enough

Yes, but the Kennedys keep on breeding.

[Bella_Bru]

Your tagline: Tancredo and I wanna know what you believe

I happen to agree with much of what Tancredo says about illegal immigratrion. However, to most liberals and some GOP'ers, and even some around here, his ideas are 'harmful'. ome here think they are 'harmful' to the GOP.

[Celtjew Libertarian]

Also, some day, your daughter will be old enough and, hopefully, wise enough to read these books -- not to mention, watch the TV programs, play the video games, and listen to the CDs.

[WOSG]

Mill jumped on to Benthamite "utilitarianism", did he not?

Utilitarianism is an incorrect and dnagerous moral stance that has been a basis for 'collectivism' ethics in the 20th century. It could be for that reason that it was deemed harmful.

[tiamat]

If i do my job right, and teach her how to think, she should be..

(hello! Long time, no see!)

[Rembrandt_fan]

So, are you and a gaggle of like-minded friends the ones who determine what books we read and what ideas we hear? Murderous authoritarians look for any rationale to justify their sadism and intolerance. Even Hitler remarked how easy it was to convert hardcore communists into loyal national socialists. The desire to dominate and kill runs deeper than any ideology.

Those millions of people you wrote about were not killed by abstract concepts written on paper and bound in leather. They were killed by bullet, bayonet, and gas. Pelting them with books would've been simply too inefficient--unless, of course, you're talking about Marx's 'Das Capital'. That thing is a monster by any measure.