100 Most Influential Books Ever Written

by Martin Seymour-Smith

Note: This list is in chronological order. I've gotten e-mails from people who complain that there are too many religious books on the list. Say what you want, but you cannot deny that religion has been influential in human history. I'm sure that's what Seymour-Smith had in mind

The I Ching The Old Testament The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer The Upanishads The Way and Its Power , Lao-tzu The Avesta Analects , Confucius History of the Peloponnesian War , Thucydides Works, Hippocrates Works, Aristotle History , Herodotus The Republic , Plato Elements , Euclid The Dhammapada Aeneid , Virgil On the Nature of Reality , Lucretius Allegorical Expositions of the Holy Laws , Philo of Alexandria The New Testament Lives , Plutarch Annals, from the Death of the Divine Augustus , Cornelius Tacitus The Gospel of Truth Meditations , Marcus Aurelius Outlines of Pyrrhonism , Sextus Empiricus Enneads , Plotinus Confessions , Augustine of Hippo The Koran Guide for the Perplexed , Moses Maimonides The Kabbalah Summa Theologicae , Thomas Aquinas The Divine Comedy , Dante Alighieri In Praise of Folly , Desiderius Erasmus The Prince , Niccolò Machiavelli On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church , Martin Luther Gargantua and Pantagruel , François Rabelais Institutes of the Christian Religion , John Calvin On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs , Nicolaus Copernicus Essays , Michel Eyquem de Montaigne Don Quixote , Parts I and II, Miguel de Cervantes The Harmony of the World , Johannes Kepler Novum Organum , Francis Bacon The First Folio [Works], William Shakespeare Dialogue Concerning Two New Chief World Systems , Galileo Galilei Discourse on Method , René Descartes Leviathan , Thomas Hobbes Works, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Pensées , Blaise Pascal Ethics , Baruch de Spinoza Pilgrim's Progress , John Bunyan Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy , Isaac Newton Essay Concerning Human Understanding , John Locke The Principles of Human Knowledge , George Berkeley The New Science , Giambattista Vico A Treatise of Human Nature , David Hume The Encyclopedia , Denis Diderot, ed A Dictionary of the English Language , Samuel Johnson Candide , François-Marie de Voltaire Common Sense , Thomas Paine An Enquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations , Adam Smith The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , Edward Gibbon Critique of Pure Reason , Immanuel Kant Confessions , Jean-Jacques Rousseau Reflections on the Revolution in France , Edmund Burke Vindication of the Rights of Women , Mary Wollstonecraft An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice , William Godwin An Essay on the Principle of Population , Thomas Robert Malthus Phenomenology of Spirit , George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel The World as Will and Idea , Arthur Schopenhauer Course in the Positivist Philosophy , Auguste Comte On War , Carl Marie von Clausewitz Either/Or , Søren Kierkegaard The Manifesto of the Communist Party , Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels "Civil Disobedience," Henry David Thoreau The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection , Charles Darwin On Liberty , John Stuart Mill First Principles , Herbert Spencer "Experiments with Plant Hybrids," Gregor Mendel War and Peace , Leo Tolstoy Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism , James Clerk Maxwell Thus Spake Zarathustra , Friedrich Nietzsche The Interpretation of Dreams , Sigmund Freud Pragmatism , William James Relativity , Albert Einstein The Mind and Society , Vilfredo Pareto Psychological Types , Carl Gustav Jung I and Thou , Martin Buber The Trial , Franz Kafka The Logic of Scientific Discovery , Karl Popper The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money , John Maynard Keynes Being and Nothingness , Jean-Paul Sartre The Road to Serfdom , Friedrich von Hayek The Second Sex , Simone de Beauvoir Cybernetics , Norbert Wiener Nineteen Eighty-Four , George Orwell Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson , George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff Philosophical Investigations , Ludwig Wittgenstein Syntactic Structures , Noam Chomsky The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , T. S. Kuhn The Feminine Mystique , Betty Friedan Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung [The Little Red Book], Mao Zedong Beyond Freedom and Dignity , B. F. Skinner

The content of this page may belong to the author. The transcription, however, is the result of my research and hard work. It may not be reposted on any Web site, newsgroup, mailing list, or other publicly available electronic format. Please link to this page instead.