While pop culture columnists, behavioral psychologists and literary gadflies debate the pros and cons of “Fifty Shades of Grey”, we look at some more notable, though perhaps no-less controversial works, in their time. Notable in the sense that ideas from any of these books — whether you are in agreement with them or not — have had a profound influence of our cultural, political, economic and scientific evolution.
Yet while all combined have come nowhere close to the 1 million-plus sales in just over 10 weeks, with 20 million in sales so far, of the sado-masochistic pulp fiction, they do offer an enlightening counter-balance. So, if you need some fleeting titillation by all means loan “Fifty Shades…” from a friend or neighbor — why buy one, everybody else has one already. But then, go to your local bookstore or click to Amazon and purchase a handful from this list spanning 30 centuries — you will be reminded of our ongoing, if sometimes limited, intellectual progress as a species.
1 I Ching, Chinese classic texts
2 Hebrew Bible, Jewish scripture
3 Iliad and The Odyssey, Homer
4 Upanishads, Hindu scripture
5 The Way and Its Power, Lao-tzu
6 The Avesta, Zoroastrian scripture
7 Analects, Confucius
8 History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides
9 Works, Hippocrates
10 Works, Aristotle
11 History, Herodotus
12 The Republic, Plato
13 Elements, Euclid
14 Dhammapada, Theravada Buddhist scripture
15 Aeneid, Virgil
16 On the Nature of Reality, Lucretius
17 Allegorical Expositions of the Holy Laws, Philo of Alexandria
18 New Testament, Christian scripture
19 Parallel Lives, Plutarch
20 Annals, from the Death of the Divine Augustus, Cornelius Tacitus
21 Gospel of Truth, Valentinus
22 Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
23 Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Sextus Empiricus
24 Enneads, Plotinus
25 Confessions, Augustine of Hippo
26 Koran, Muslim scripture
27 Guide for the Perplexed, Moses Maimonides
28 Kabbalah, Text of Judaic mysticism
29 Summa Theologicae, Thomas Aquinas
30 The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri
31 In Praise of Folly, Desiderius Erasmus
32 The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli
33 On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Martin Luther
34 Gargantua and Pantagruel, François Rabelais
35 Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin
36 On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs, Nicolaus Copernicus
37 Essays, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
38 Don Quixote, Parts I and II, Miguel de Cervantes
39 The Harmony of the World, Johannes Kepler
40 Novum Organum, Francis Bacon
41 The First Folio [Works], William Shakespeare
42 Dialogue Concerning Two New Chief World Systems, Galileo Galilei
43 Discourse on Method, René Descartes
44 Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes
45 Works, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
46 Pensées, Blaise Pascal
47 Ethics, Baruch de Spinoza
48 Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan
49 Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Isaac Newton
50 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke
51 The Principles of Human Knowledge, George Berkeley
52 The New Science, Giambattista Vico
53 A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume
54 The Encyclopedia, Denis Diderot, ed.
55 A Dictionary of the English Language, Samuel Johnson
56 Candide, François-Marie de Voltaire
57 Common Sense, Thomas Paine
58 An Enquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith
59 The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon
60 Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant
61 Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
62 Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke
63 Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft
64 An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, William Godwin
65 An Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Robert Malthus
66 Phenomenology of Spirit, George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
67 The World as Will and Idea, Arthur Schopenhauer
68 Course in the Positivist Philosophy, Auguste Comte
69 On War, Carl Marie von Clausewitz
70 Either/Or, Søren Kierkegaard
71 Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
72 “Civil Disobedience,” Henry David Thoreau
73 The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin
74 On Liberty, John Stuart Mill
75 First Principles, Herbert Spencer
76 Experiments on Plant Hybridization, Gregor Mendel
77 War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
78 Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, James Clerk Maxwell
79 Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche
80 The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud
81 Pragmatism, William James
82 Relativity, Albert Einstein
83 The Mind and Society, Vilfredo Pareto
84 Psychological Types, Carl Gustav Jung
85 I and Thou, Martin Buber
86 The Trial, Franz Kafka
87 The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl Popper
88 The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, John Maynard Keynes
89 Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre
90 The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich von Hayek
91 The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
92 Cybernetics, Norbert Wiener
93 Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
94 Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff
95 Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein
96 Syntactic Structures, Noam Chomsky
97 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, T. S. Kuhn
98 The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
99 Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung [The Little Red Book], Mao Zedong
100 Beyond Freedom and Dignity, B. F. Skinner
The well-rounded list featuring critically acclaimed novels, poetic masterpieces, scientific first principals, political and religious works was compiled by Martin Seymour-Smith, in his 1998 book, The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written: The History of Thought from Ancient Times to Today. Seymour-Smith is a British poet, critic, and biographer.
[div class=attrib]Image: “On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres” by Nicolaus Copernicus, 1543.[end-div]