'100 Most Influential Books Ever Written' by Martin Seymour-Smith

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

Seymour-Smith, Martin. 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written. Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1998. © 1998 Martin Seymour-Smith