Henry David Thoreau |
100 Most Influential Books |
John Stuart Mill |
|
Henry David Thoreau |
100 Most Influential Books |
John Stuart Mill |
The following list was obtained from Martin Seymour-Smith's The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written: The History of Thought from Ancient Times to Today (1998). For each of the books, Seymour-Smith provides 3-5 pages of commentary. His selections are listed in chronological order.
| 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 |
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