Most Harmful Books

[psocoptera]

You cannot buy advertising like this! A bunch of conservatives have helpfully figured out the Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries so that we can make sure we've read them all. Actually I'm kind of disappointed in myself for how few of these I've read. But anyways, it's kind of interesting to see who makes the "most dangerous authors" list : Marx, Hitler, Mao, *Kinsey*? Because of course being a pervy sex researcher is right up there with the slaughter of millions!

1. The Communist Manifesto
Authors: Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels
Publication date: 1848

2. Mein Kampf
Author: Adolf Hitler
Publication date: 1925-26

3. Quotations from Chairman Mao
Author: Mao Zedong
Publication date: 1966

4. The Kinsey Report
Author: Alfred Kinsey
Publication date: 1948

5. Democracy and Education
Author: John Dewey
Publication date: 1916

6. Das Kapital
Author: Karl Marx
Publication date: 1867-1894

7. The Feminine Mystique
Author: Betty Friedan
Publication date: 1963

8. The Course of Positive Philosophy
Author: Auguste Comte
Publication date: 1830-1842

9. Beyond Good and Evil
Author: Freidrich Nietzsche
Publication date: 1886

10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
Author: John Maynard Keynes
Publication date: 1936


Honorable Mention

The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich
What Is To Be Done by V.I. Lenin
Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F. Skinner
Reflections on Violence by Georges Sorel
The Promise of American Life by Herbert Croly
Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin
Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault
Soviet Communism: A New Civilization by Sidney and Beatrice Webb
Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead
Unsafe at Any Speed by Ralph Nader
Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
The Greening of America by Charles Reich
The Limits to Growth by Club of Rome
Descent of Man by Charles Darwin


Some of these I haven't even heard of (who's Sorel, or Croly, or Reich?), but I'm totally now picturing a big cocktail party (possibly in the afterlife) where people are bickering over whether, no no, *their* book was *totally* more threatening.

But seriously, I'm very tempted to take this as a personal non-fiction reading list for the next ten years. Or maybe organize a book club. I don't think I could stomach Mein Kampf but the Communist Manifesto and Feminine Mystique were both pretty engaging as I recall - a good balance of things to agree and disagree with - so that speaks well for the rest of the list.

Comments

[cereph.livejournal.com]

gee. books that make people think and also question the status quo are "harmful."

oh wait, right, we're supposed to be mindless zombies that don't think.

interstesting list, thats for sure.

[arctangent.livejournal.com]

That's massively unfair, given that a good number of these books have at some point in the past *been* the status quo, and that the "conservative" movements against them developed late and iconoclastically. I'm thinking especially of Keynes, but Dewey fits that category too, and Rachel Carson.

I mean, sure, the books changed a lot of people's minds and challenged the status quo at the time, but if they hadn't done that they wouldn't even be relevant books that anyone would know about, much less harmful ones. But the progressive view of history -- that these books are always speaking for the "new" and their detractors for the "old" -- fails here. Darwin, for instance, has become progressively *more* controversial in the popular press as time has passed, not less -- the Scopes Trial was the *beginning* of the religious and political attack on evolution, not the end of it.