The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written: The History of Thought from Ancient Times to Today
Author	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 (1928–1998), a British poet, critic, and biographer.

[edit] Chronological list

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

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

[edit] See also

• List of best-selling books

[edit] References

• Seymour-Smith, Martin (1998). The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written: The History of Thought from Ancient Times to Today, Citadel Press, Secaucus, NJ, 1998, ISBN 0806520000