The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written

The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written: The History of Thought from Ancient Times to Today

Author	Martin Seymour-Smith
Language	English
Publisher	Citadel
Publication date	September, 1998
Publication place	United Kingdom
Media type	Print (hardcover and paperback)
ISBN	978-0806520001
OCLC	38258131

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, a British poet, critic, and biographer.

Chronological list

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

#	Author or source	Title	Date	Public domain?
1	Chinese classic texts	I Ching	c. 11th century BC	yes
2	Jewish scripture	Hebrew Bible	c. 10th–5th century BC	yes
3	Homer	Iliad and Odyssey	c. 8th – early 7th century BC	yes
4	Hindu scripture	Upanishads	c. 9th century BC	yes
5	Lao Tsu	Tao Te Ching	c. 4th century BC	yes
6	Zoroastrian scripture	Avesta	c. 600 BC – 3rd century AD	yes
7	Confucius	Analects	c. 5th–4th century BC	yes
8	Thucydides	History of the Peloponnesian War	c. 5th century BC	yes
9	Hippocrates	Works	c. 400 BC	yes
10	Aristotle	Works	c. 4th century BC	yes
11	Herodotus	Histories	c. 5th century BC	yes
12	Plato	The Republic	c. 380 BC	yes
13	Euclid	Elements	c. 280 BC	yes
14	Theravada Buddhist scripture	Dhammapada (Path of the Dharma)	c. 252 BC	yes
15	Virgil	Aeneid	c. 19 BC	yes
16	Lucretius	De Rerum Natura	c. 55 BC	yes
17	Philo of Alexandria	Allegorical Expositions of the Holy Laws	c. 1st century AD	yes
18	Christian scripture	New Testament	c. 1st century AD	yes
19	Plutarch	Parallel Lives	c. 120 AD	yes
20	Cornelius Tacitus	Annals, From the Death of the Divine Augustus	c. 120 AD	yes
21	Valentinus	Gospel of Truth (Gnostic text)	c. 140 AD-180 AD	yes
22	Marcus Aurelius	Meditations	c. 167	yes
23	Sextus Empiricus	Outlines of Pyrrhonism	c. 150–210 AD	yes
24	Plotinus	Enneads	3rd century	yes
25	Augustine of Hippo	Confessions	400 AD	yes
26	Muslim scripture	Quran	632 AD	yes
27	al-Khawarizmi	The Compendious Book on Calculation	820 AD	yes
28	Avicenna	The Canon of Medicine	1025	yes
29	Moses Maimonides	Guide for the Perplexed	1190	yes
29	Text of Judaic mysticism	Kabbalah	12th century	yes
29	Thomas Aquinas	Summa Theologiae	1266–1273	yes
30	Dante Alighieri	The Divine Comedy	1321	yes
31	Desiderius Erasmus	In Praise of Folly	1509	yes
32	Niccolò Machiavelli	The Prince	1532	yes
33	Martin Luther	On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church	1520	yes
34	François Rabelais	Gargantua and Pantagruel	1532 and 1534	yes
35	John Calvin	Institutes of the Christian Religion	1536	yes
36	Nicolaus Copernicus	On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres	1543	yes
37	Michel de Montaigne	Essays	1580	yes
38	Miguel de Cervantes	Don Quixote	1605 and 1615	yes
39	Johannes Kepler	Harmony of the Worlds	1619	yes
40	Francis Bacon	Novum Organum	1620	yes
41	William Shakespeare	First Folio	1623	yes
42	Galileo Galilei	Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems	1632	yes
43	René Descartes	Discourse on Method	1637	yes
44	Thomas Hobbes	Leviathan	1651	yes
45	Gottfried Leibniz	Works	1663–1716	yes
46	Blaise Pascal	Pensées	1670	yes
47	Baruch de Spinoza	Ethics	1677	yes
48	John Bunyan	Pilgrim's Progress	1678–1684	yes
49	Isaac Newton	Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy	1687	yes
50	John Locke	Essay Concerning Human Understanding	1689	yes
51	George Berkeley	Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge	1710, revised 1734	yes
52	Giambattista Vico	The New Science	1725, revised 1744	yes
53	David Hume	A Treatise of Human Nature	1739–1740	yes
54	Denis Diderot (ed.)	Encyclopédie	1751–1772	yes
55	Samuel Johnson	A Dictionary of the English Language	1755	yes
56	Voltaire	Candide	1759	yes
57	Thomas Paine	Common Sense	1776	yes
58	Adam Smith	The Wealth of Nations	1776	yes
59	Edward Gibbon	The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire	1776–1787	yes
60	Immanuel Kant	Critique of Pure Reason	1781, revised 1787	yes
61	Jean-Jacques Rousseau	Confessions	1781	yes
62	Edmund Burke	Reflections on the Revolution in France	1790	yes
63	Mary Wollstonecraft	A Vindication of the Rights of Woman	1792	yes
64	William Godwin	An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice	1793	yes
65	Thomas Robert Malthus	An Essay on the Principle of Population	1798, revised 1803	yes
66	George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel	Phenomenology of Spirit	1807	yes
67	Arthur Schopenhauer	The World as Will and Idea	1819	yes
68	Auguste Comte	The Course in Positive Philosophy	1830–1842	yes
69	Carl von Clausewitz	On War	1832	yes
70	Søren Kierkegaard	Either/Or	1843	yes
71	Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels	Communist Manifesto	1848	yes
72	Henry David Thoreau	Civil Disobedience	1849	yes
73	Charles Darwin	The Origin of Species	1859	yes
74	John Stuart Mill	On Liberty	1859	yes
75	Herbert Spencer	First Principles	1862	yes
76	Gregor Mendel	Experiments on Plant Hybridization	1866	yes
77	Leo Tolstoy	War and Peace	1868–1869	yes
78	James Clerk Maxwell	A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism	1873	yes
79	Friedrich Nietzsche	Thus Spoke Zarathustra	1883–1885	yes
80	Sigmund Freud	The Interpretation of Dreams	1900	yes
81	William James	Pragmatism	1908	yes
82	Albert Einstein	Relativity	1916	yes
83	Vilfredo Pareto	The Mind and Society	1916	yes
84	Carl Jung	Psychological Types	1921
85	Martin Buber	I and Thou	1923
86	Franz Kafka	The Trial	1925	yes
87	Karl Popper	The Logic of Scientific Discovery	1934
88	John Maynard Keynes	General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money	1936	yes
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 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 (attributed)	Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong (Little Red Book)	1966	yes
100	B. F. Skinner	Beyond Freedom and Dignity	1971

See also

• List of best-selling books
• The 100 Best Books of All Time