The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written (book)

The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written: The History of Thought from Ancient Times to Today  
Author(s) Martin Seymour-Smith
Country United Kingdom
Language English
Publisher Citadel
Publication date September, 1998
Media type Print (hardcover and paperback)

The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written: The History of Thought from Ancient Times to Today (1998) is a book of intellectual history written by Martin Seymour-Smith, a British poet, critic, and biographer.

Contents

Chronological list

The one hundred most influential books, according to Seymour-Smith, in the approximate chronological order he gives:

# Author or source Title Date Public domain?
1 Chinese classic texts I Ching 11th century BC yes
2 Jewish scripture Hebrew Bible 8th–4th century BC yes
3 Homer Iliad and Odyssey 8th – early 7th century BC yes
4 Hindu scripture Upanishads 9th[1] – 6th[1] Century BC yes
5 Lao Tsu Tao Te Ching 4th century BC yes
6 Zoroastrian scripture Avesta 1st millennium BC – 3rd century AD yes
7 Confucius Analects 5th–4th century BC yes
8 Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War 5th century BC yes
9 Hippocrates Works 400 BC yes
10 Aristotle Works 4th century BC yes
11 Herodotus Histories 5th century BC yes
12 Plato The Republic 380 BC yes
13 Euclid Elements 280 BC yes
14 Theravada Buddhist scripture Dhammapada (Path of the Dharma) 252 BC yes
15 Virgil Aeneid 19 BC yes
16 Lucretius De Rerum Natura 55 BC yes
17 Philo of Alexandria Allegorical Expositions of the Holy Laws 1st century yes
18 Christian scripture New Testament ca. 50–100 AD yes
19 Plutarch Parallel Lives 120 AD yes
20 Cornelius Tacitus Annals, From the Death of the Divine Augustus 120 AD yes
21 Valentinus Gospel of Truth (Gnostic text) 2nd century yes
22 Marcus Aurelius Meditations 167 yes
23 Sextus Empiricus Outlines of Pyrrhonism 150–210 AD yes
24 Plotinus Enneads 3rd century yes
25 Augustine of Hippo Confessions 400 AD yes
26 Muslim scripture Quran 7th century yes
27 Moses Maimonides Guide for the Perplexed 1190 yes
28 Text of Judaic mysticism Kabbalah 12th century yes
29 Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae 1266–1273 yes
30 Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy 1321 yes
31 Desiderius Erasmus In Praise of Folly 1509 yes
32 Niccolò Machiavelli The Prince 1532 yes
33 Martin Luther On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church 1520 yes
34 François Rabelais Gargantua and Pantagruel 1532 & 1534 yes
35 John Calvin Institutes of the Christian Religion 1536 yes
36 Nicolaus Copernicus On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres 1543 yes
37 Michel de Montaigne Essays 1580 yes
38 Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote 1605 & 1615 yes
39 Johannes Kepler Harmony of the Worlds 1619 yes
40 Francis Bacon Novum Organum 1620 yes
41 William Shakespeare First Folio 1623 yes
42 Galileo Galilei Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems 1632 yes
43 René Descartes Discourse on Method 1637 yes
44 Thomas Hobbes Leviathan 1651 yes
45 Gottfried Leibniz Works 1663–1716 yes
46 Blaise Pascal Pensées 1670 yes
47 Baruch de Spinoza Ethics 1677 yes
48 John Bunyan Pilgrim's Progress 1678–1684 yes
49 Isaac Newton Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy 1687 yes
50 John Locke Essay Concerning Human Understanding 1689 yes
51 George Berkeley Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge 1710, revised 1734 yes
52 Giambattista Vico The New Science 1725, revised 1744 yes
53 David Hume A Treatise of Human Nature 1739–1740 yes
54 Denis Diderot (ed.) Encyclopédie 1751–1772 yes
55 Samuel Johnson A Dictionary of the English Language 1755 yes
56 Voltaire Candide 1759 yes
57 Thomas Paine Common Sense 1776 yes
58 Adam Smith The Wealth of Nations 1776 yes
59 Edward Gibbon The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 1776–1787 yes
60 Immanuel Kant Critique of Pure Reason 1781, revised 1787 yes
61 Jean-Jacques Rousseau Confessions 1781 yes
62 Edmund Burke Reflections on the Revolution in France 1790 yes
63 Mary Wollstonecraft A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 1792 yes
64 William Godwin An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice 1793 yes
65 Thomas Robert Malthus An Essay on the Principle of Population 1798, revised 1803 yes
66 George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Phenomenology of Spirit 1807 yes
67 Arthur Schopenhauer The World as Will and Idea 1819 yes
68 Auguste Comte The Course in Positive Philosophy 1830–1842 yes
69 Carl von Clausewitz On War 1832 yes
70 Søren Kierkegaard Either/Or 1843 yes
71 Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels Communist Manifesto 1848 yes
72 Henry David Thoreau Civil Disobedience 1849 yes
73 Charles Darwin The Origin of Species 1859 yes
74 John Stuart Mill On Liberty 1859 yes
75 Herbert Spencer First Principles 1862 yes
76 Gregor Mendel Experiments on Plant Hybridization 1866 yes
77 Leo Tolstoy War and Peace 1868–1869 yes
78 James Clerk Maxwell Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism 1873 yes
79 Friedrich Nietzsche Thus Spoke Zarathustra 1883–1885 yes
80 Sigmund Freud The Interpretation of Dreams 1900 yes
81 William James Pragmatism 1908 yes
82 Albert Einstein Relativity 1916 yes
83 Vilfredo Pareto The Mind and Society 1916 yes
84 Carl Jung Psychological Types 1921
85 Martin Buber I and Thou 1923
86 Franz Kafka The Trial 1925 yes
87 Karl Popper The Logic of Scientific Discovery 1934
88 John Maynard Keynes General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money 1936 yes
89 Jean-Paul Sartre Being and Nothingness 1943
90 Friedrich von Hayek The Road to Serfdom 1944
91 Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex 1948
92 Norbert Wiener Cybernetics 1948, revised 1961
93 George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-Four 1949
94 George Gurdjieff Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson 1950
95 Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations 1953
96 Noam Chomsky Syntactic Structures 1957
97 Thomas Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 1962, revised 1970
98 Betty Friedan The Feminine Mystique 1963
99 Mao Zedong
(attributed)		 Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong (Little Red Book) 1966
100 B. F. Skinner Beyond Freedom and Dignity 1971

See also

Notes

  1. ^ a b http://www.hindu-info.com/Upanishads.html

References