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[holzman_tweed]

Ganked from maxomai

The reactionary "Human Events Online" have announced their Ten Most Harmful Books of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. To quote jadegirl, "So basicly, these people are against Western Civilization."

Free thinking people everywhere -- scratch that, people who want to understand how our society got to be the way it is as a foundation to figuring out where we want it to be should consider these books required reading.

I reproduce both the top ten and the honorable mentions:

Top Ten

Honorable Mention

1. The Communist Manifesto 2. Mein Kampf 3. Quotations from Chairman Mao 4. The Kinsey Report 5. Democracy and Education 6. Das Kapital 7. The Feminine Mystique 8. The Course of Positive Philosophy 9. Beyond Good and Evil 10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

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

I'll be updating this for proper referencing and including hotlinks to any of these books that happen to be online.

Comments

[docstrange.livejournal.com]

I am not sure what they're trying to do. Are they calling to ban the books, or listing ones that they think had negative impact from a historical perspective? I realize such a list always sounds like calls to ban/burn/damn books, but honestly, some books have overall had a not very postive impact on society (via those who make use of them suchly). I'm really interested for example that the Protocols aren't on there -- very harmful, and a hoax built on a hoax.

The list is also interesting because a number of those books were quite influential, and turned out to be built on flatly bad data or on erroneous premises. Meanwhile, others on the list were and remain concept/opinion pieces that (while they have had influence) I'm rather surprised could be tagged "harmful" (esp. Mill). And the science books of the past often look "bad" from today's point of view: If continued widely read without critique they could (I suppose) be considered "harmful" by perpetuating past erroneous beliefs -- but that would be to ignore their value as stepping stones. Ditto the historical/political tracts of the past.

So, like many things, this list is a "good thing or a bad thing" depending on the uses its makers are trying to put to it.