Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries

Thought y'all might get a kick out of this list


http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=7591

[size=+2]Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries[/size]
Posted May 31, 2005

HUMAN EVENTS asked a panel of 15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders to help us compile a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Each panelist nominated a number of titles and then voted on a ballot including all books nominated. A title received a score of 10 points for being listed No. 1 by one of our panelists, 9 points for being listed No. 2, etc. Appropriately, The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, earned the highest aggregate score and the No. 1 listing.

1. The Communist Manifesto


Authors: Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels
Publication date: 1848
Score: 74
Summary: Marx and Engels, born in Germany in 1818 and 1820, respectively, were the intellectual godfathers of communism. Engels was the original limousine leftist: A wealthy textile heir, he financed Marx for much of his life. In 1848, the two co-authored The Communist Manifesto as a platform for a group they belonged to called the Communist League. The Manifesto envisions history as a class struggle between oppressed workers and oppressive owners, calling for a workers’ revolution so property, family and nation-states can be abolished and a proletarian Utopia established. The Evil Empire of the Soviet Union put the Manifesto into practice.

2. Mein Kampf


Author: Adolf Hitler
Publication date: 1925-26
Score: 41
Summary: Mein Kampf (My Struggle) was initially published in two parts in 1925 and 1926 after Hitler was imprisoned for leading Nazi Brown Shirts in the so-called “Beer Hall Putsch” that tried to overthrow the Bavarian government. Here Hitler explained his racist, anti-Semitic vision for Germany, laying out a Nazi program pointing directly to World War II and the Holocaust. He envisioned the mass murder of Jews, and a war against France to precede a war against Russia to carve out “lebensraum” (“living room”) for Germans in Eastern Europe. The book was originally ignored. But not after Hitler rose to power. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, there were 10 million copies in circulation by 1945.

3. Quotations from Chairman Mao


Author: Mao Zedong
Publication date: 1966
Score: 38
Summary: Mao, who died in 1976, was the leader of the Red Army in the fight for control of China against the anti-Communist forces of Chiang Kai-shek before, during and after World War II. Victorious, in 1949, he founded the People’s Republic of China, enslaving the world’s most populous nation in communism. In 1966, he published Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, otherwise known as The Little Red Book, as a tool in the “Cultural Revolution” he launched to push the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese society back in his ideological direction. Aided by compulsory distribution in China, billions were printed. Western leftists were enamored with its Marxist anti-Americanism. “It is the task of the people of the whole world to put an end to the aggression and oppression perpetrated by imperialism, and chiefly by U.S. imperialism,” wrote Mao.

4. The Kinsey Report


Author: Alfred Kinsey
Publication date: 1948
Score: 37
Summary: Alfred Kinsey was a zoologist at Indiana University who, in 1948, published a study called Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, commonly known as The Kinsey Report. Five years later, he published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. The reports were designed to give a scientific gloss to the normalization of promiscuity and deviancy. “Kinsey’s initial report, released in 1948 . . . stunned the nation by saying that American men were so sexually wild that 95% of them could be accused of some kind of sexual offense under 1940s laws,” the Washington Times reported last year when a movie on Kinsey was released. “The report included reports of sexual activity by boys--even babies--and said that 37% of adult males had had at least one homosexual experience. . . . The 1953 book also included reports of sexual activity involving girls younger than age 4, and suggested that sex between adults and children could be beneficial.”

5. Democracy and Education


Author: John Dewey
Publication date: 1916
Score: 36
Summary: John Dewey, who lived from 1859 until 1952, was a “progressive” philosopher and leading advocate for secular humanism in American life, who taught at the University of Chicago and at Columbia. He signed the Humanist Manifesto and rejected traditional religion and moral absolutes. In Democracy and Education, in pompous and opaque prose, he disparaged schooling that focused on traditional character development and endowing children with hard knowledge, and encouraged the teaching of thinking “skills” instead. His views had great influence on the direction of American education--particularly in public schools--and helped nurture the Clinton generation.

6. Das Kapital


Author: Karl Marx
Publication date: 1867-1894
Score: 31
Summary: Marx died after publishing a first volume of this massive book, after which his benefactor Engels edited and published two additional volumes that Marx had drafted. Das Kapital forces the round peg of capitalism into the square hole of Marx’s materialistic theory of history, portraying capitalism as an ugly phase in the development of human society in which capitalists inevitably and amorally exploit labor by paying the cheapest possible wages to earn the greatest possible profits. Marx theorized that the inevitable eventual outcome would be global proletarian revolution. He could not have predicted 21st Century America: a free, affluent society based on capitalism and representative government that people the world over envy and seek to emulate.

7. The Feminine Mystique


Author: Betty Friedan
Publication date: 1963
Score: 30
Summary: In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan, born in 1921, disparaged traditional stay-at-home motherhood as life in “a comfortable concentration camp”--a role that degraded women and denied them true fulfillment in life. She later became founding president of the National Organization for Women. Her original vocation, tellingly, was not stay-at-home motherhood but left-wing journalism. As David Horowitz wrote in a review for Salon.com of Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique by Daniel Horowitz (no relation to David): The author documents that “Friedan was from her college days, and until her mid-30s, a Stalinist Marxist, the political intimate of the leaders of America’s Cold War fifth column and for a time even the lover of a young Communist physicist working on atomic bomb projects in Berkeley’s radiation lab with J. Robert Oppenheimer.”

8. The Course of Positive Philosophy


Author: Auguste Comte
Publication date: 1830-1842
Score: 28
Summary: Comte, the product of a royalist Catholic family that survived the French Revolution, turned his back on his political and cultural heritage, announcing as a teenager, “I have naturally ceased to believe in God.” Later, in the six volumes of The Course of Positive Philosophy, he coined the term “sociology.” He did so while theorizing that the human mind had developed beyond “theology” (a belief that there is a God who governs the universe), through “metaphysics” (in this case defined as the French revolutionaries’ reliance on abstract assertions of “rights” without a God), to “positivism,” in which man alone, through scientific observation, could determine the way things ought to be.

9. Beyond Good and Evil


Author: Freidrich Nietzsche
Publication date: 1886
Score: 28
Summary: An oft-scribbled bit of college-campus graffiti says: “‘God is dead’--Nietzsche” followed by “‘Nietzsche is dead’--God.” Nietzsche’s profession that “God is dead” appeared in his 1882 book, The Gay Science, but under-girded the basic theme of Beyond Good and Evil, which was published four years later. Here Nietzsche argued that men are driven by an amoral “Will to Power,” and that superior men will sweep aside religiously inspired moral rules, which he deemed as artificial as any other moral rules, to craft whatever rules would help them dominate the world around them. “Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation,” he wrote. The Nazis loved Nietzsche.

10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money


Author: John Maynard Keynes
Publication date: 1936
Score: 23
Summary: Keynes was a member of the British elite--educated at Eton and Cambridge--who as a liberal Cambridge economics professor wrote General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in the midst of the Great Depression. The book is a recipe for ever-expanding government. When the business cycle threatens a contraction of industry, and thus of jobs, he argued, the government should run up deficits, borrowing and spending money to spur economic activity. FDR adopted the idea as U.S. policy, and the U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual budget and an $8-trillion dollar debt.

Honorable Mention

These books won votes from two or more judges:

The Population Bomb
by Paul Ehrlich
Score: 22

What Is To Be Done
by V.I. Lenin
Score: 20

Authoritarian Personality
by Theodor Adorno
Score: 19

On Liberty
by John Stuart Mill
Score: 18

Beyond Freedom and Dignity
by B.F. Skinner
Score: 18

Reflections on Violence
by Georges Sorel
Score: 18

The Promise of American Life
by Herbert Croly
Score: 17

Origin of the Species
by Charles Darwin
Score: 17

Madness and Civilization
by Michel Foucault
Score: 12

Soviet Communism: A New Civilization
by Sidney and Beatrice Webb
Score: 12

Coming of Age in Samoa
by Margaret Mead
Score: 11

Unsafe at Any Speed
by Ralph Nader
Score: 11

Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir
Score: 10

Prison Notebooks
by Antonio Gramsci
Score: 10

Silent Spring
by Rachel Carson
Score: 9

Wretched of the Earth
by Frantz Fanon
Score: 9

Introduction to Psychoanalysis
by Sigmund Freud
Score: 9

The Greening of America
by Charles Reich
Score: 9

The Limits to Growth
by Club of Rome
Score: 4

Descent of Man
by Charles Darwin
Score: 2

Copyright © 2004 HUMAN EVENTS. All Rights Reserved.

 

That was really interesting. I own a couple of those books...

 

21st Century America: a free (except for the Patriot Act), affluent society (except for the 40% of children that live near or below the poverty line), based on capitalism and representative government (except when the Supreme Court appoints the President), that people the world over (do not) envy and seek to (annihilate).

Lol, I thought at least that entry was pretty accurate.... How about you?

 

"and seconding little doves motion, its wideyed". i see nader made honorable mention. I'd like to see the liberal top ten now.

 

that is really scary

 

It looks as though some pretty Right Wing people put together this list. WHERE in the Kinsey Report does it say that sex between children and adults is "beneficial?" The Right has been after Kinsey since the beginning. The Origin of the Species is dangerous? God knows, we can't let sceince win out over fear! Coming of Age in Samoa???? Heaven knows, we can't let anyone know the rest of the world actually isn't afraid of sex!!!! LOL! Silent Spring? I guess they think the profits of the Chemical companies is more imporant than Life On Earth. Sheesh.

These are some of the most INFLUENCIAL books ever! The Right is so afraid of Truth.

 

It looks like more of a "must-read" list than a "harmful book" list. They failed to mention that Nietzsche said "What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil".

 

I agree!

 

well conservative scholars and the like would say these are harmful books, but I guess to us its "Ten Must Read Books of the 19th and 20th centuries".

 

no book is harmfull no idea is harmfull, harmfull is the man who takes an idea and forces it on people

 

I was going to say something like this myself, but I see you already said it for me!

 

except for unsafe at any speed...... you got to be fucking kidding me

How the fuck is the feminine mystique harmful?

And the kinsey report.....

oh I see, a conservative weekly...... shit.....

I still agree that unsafe at any speed belongs there, corvairs are cool.

 

LOL totally ditto Little Dove. Guess that just shows what we're up against.

Totally agree

Okay I can see their point about some of them like Mein Kampf & the Communist mainfesto. (if only for what they spawned).
No wait you can't really blame Marx, his ideas are good on paper. How was he to know human nature is to flawed for them to work out in practise. Blame Lenin et all if you must.

But the others jeez. Darn those pesky feminists and Kinsey for opening people's eyes to the taboos and injustices or the world. Obviously nothing is perfect, but surely we can use common sense.

 

I'll be sure to get busy reading. Thank you.

 

wow, that's a pretty interesting list.

It's interesting that we still live in an age where we find the need to ban books.

 

i find it very sad

 

The only thing that really suprises me is that the Communist Manifesto is thought to be more harmful than Mein Kampf. That's a very strong statement they're making. When did Karl Marx become more harmful than Adolf Hitler? I disagree with communism, but... wow...

The fact that The Feminine Mystique made this list doesn't suprise me at all. It made me roll my eyes, but it certainly didn't make me jump out of my chair in utter amazement.

A lot of the other books I disagree are "harmful" (I don't think any book is actually harmful. I think people are harmful), but at least I can understand why a conservative may have a problem with them.

 

Most of those books. like Das Kapital are dangerous sedatives. Reading could cause a deep sleeep. Funny, i would have thought the conservatives would appreciate Neitzche, what with all that superman garbage.
I think the reason none of us have offered a liberal top ten is because we don't find books dangerous. Anything written by Rush Limbaugh or Dr. Laura or Ayn Rand is an utter piece of garbage, but harmless in it's absurdity...

 

But ideas, I wonder...perhaps they can be dangerous...the gov. promotes an idea that the country would be safe if a war on terrorismwas won. People buy that idea and vote for that adminstration. In Ontario ten years or so ago, Mike Harris promoted the idea that welfare recipients were draining the provincial economy, and by kicking people off the dole, it would mean lower taxes and those former welfare recipients would be forced to become productive members of society. People ate that idea right up and Mike Harris tok over the province by a landslide. There are plenty more ideas that can be considered dangerous, like more police means a safer world...