Seymour-Smith, 100 Most Influentia Books Martin Seymour-Smith
The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written:
The History of Thought from Ancient Times to Today

Citadel Press, Secaucus, NJ, 1998, ISBN: 0806520000 5 stars

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#AuthorTitleYear
1King Wen & Duke Chou The I Ching1500 B.C.
2MosesThe Old Testament1500 B.C.
3HomerThe Iliad & The Odyssey9th century B.C.
4Hindu rishis The Upanishads700 B.C.-400 B.C.
5Lao-tzu The Way and Its Power3rd century B.C.
6ZoroasterThe Avesta500 B.C.
7Confucius Analects5th-4th century B.C.
8ThucydidesHistory of the Peloponnesian War5th century B.C.
9HippocratesWorks400 B.C.
10AristotleWorks4th century B.C.
11HerodotusHistory4th century
12Plato The Republic380 B.C.
13EuclidElements280 B.C.
14Buddha The Dhammapada252 B.C.
15Virgil The Aeneid19 B.C.
16Lucretius On the Nature of Reality55 B.C.
17Philo of AlexandriaAllegorical Expositions of the Holy Law1st century A.D.
18JesusThe New Testament64-110 A.D.
19PlutarchLives120 A.D.
20Cornelius TacitusAnnals, From the Death of the Divine Augustus120 A.D.
21ValentinusThe Gospel of Truth1st century A.D.
22Marcus AureliusMeditations167 A.D.
23Sextus EmpiricusOutlines of Pyrrhonism150-210 A.D.
24Plotinus The Enneads3rd century A.D.
25Augustine of HippoConfessions400 A.D.
26MuhammedThe Koran7th century A.D.
27Moses MaimonidesGuide for the Perplexed1190
28Moses de LeonThe Kabbalah12th century
29Thomas AquinasSumma Theologiae1266-1273
30Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy1321
31Desiderius ErasmusIn Praise of Folly1509
32Niccolo MachiavelliThe Prince1532
33Martin LutherOn the Babylonian Captivity of the Church1520
34François RabelaisGargantua and Pantagruel1534 & 1532
35John CalvinInstitutes of the Christian Religion1536
36Nicolaus CopernicusOn the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs1543
37Michael Eyquem de MontaigneEssays1580
38Miguel de CervantesDon Quixote, Parts I and II1605 & 1615
39Johannes KeplerThe Harmony of the World1619
40Francis BaconNovum Organum1620
41William Shakespeare The First Folio1001623
42Galileo GalileiDialogue Concerning Two New Chief World Systems1632
43Rene DescartesDiscourse on Method1637
44Thomas HobbesLeviathan1651
45Gottfried Wilhelm LeibnizWorks1663-1716
46Blaise PascalPensées1670
47Baruch de SpinozaEthics1677
48John BunyanPilgrim's Progress1678-1684
49Isaac NewtonMathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy1687
50John LockeEssay Concerning Human Understanding1689
51George BerkeleyThe Principles of Human Knowledge1710, revised 1734
52Giambattista VicoThe New Science1725, revised 1744
53David HumeA Treatise of Human Nature1739-1740
54Denis Diderot (Ed.)The Encyclopedia1751-1772
55Samuel JohnsonA Dictionary of the English Language1755
56François-Marie de VoltaireCandide1759
57Thomas PaineCommon Sense1776
58Adam SmithAn Enquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations1776
59Edward GibbonThe History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire1776-1787
60Immanuel KantCritique of Pure Reason1781, revised 1787
61Jean-Jacques RousseauConfessions1781
62Edmund BurkeReflections on the Revolution in France1790
63Mary Wollstonecraft Vindication of the Rights of Woman1792
64William GodwinAn Enquiry Concerning Political Justice1793
65Thomas Robert MalthusAn Essay on the Principle of Population1798, revised 1803
66George Wilhelm Friedrich HegelPhenomenology of Spirit1807
67Arthur SchopenhauerThe World as Will and Idea1819
68Auguste Comte Course in the Positivist Philosophy1830-1842
69Carl Marie von Clausewitz On War1832
70Soren KierkegaardEither/Or1843
71Karl Marx & Friedrich EngelsThe Manifesto of the Communist Party1848
72Henry David Thoreau Civil Disobedience1849
73Charles Darwin The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection1859
74John Stuart Mill On Liberty1859
75Herbert SpencerFirst Principles1862
76Gregor MendelExperiments With Plant Hybrids1866
77Leo Tolstoy War and Peace1868-1869
78James Clerk Maxwell Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism1873
79Friedrich Nietzsche Thus Spake Zarathustra1883-1885
80Sigmund Freud The Interpretation of Dreams1900
81William James Pragmatism1908
82Albert Einstein Relativity1916
83Vilfredo Pareto The Mind and Society1916
84Carl Gustav Jung Psychological Types1921
85Martin Buber I and Thou1923
86Franz Kafka The Trial1925
87Karl Popper The Logic of Scientific Discovery1934
88John Maynard Keynes General Theory of Employment Interest, and Money1936
89Jean-Paul Sartre Being and Nothingness1943
90Friedrich von Hayek The Road to Serfdom1944
91Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex1948
92Norbert Wiener Cybernetics1948, revised 1961
93George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-Four1949
94George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson1950
95Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosphical Investigations1953
96Noam ChomskySyntactic Structures1957
97T. S. Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions1962, revised 1970
98Betty Friedan The Feminine Mystique1963
99Mao Zedong Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-tung1966
100B. F. Skinner Beyond Freedom and Dignity1971

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