I happened upon a pretty cool list the other day.

Martin Seymour-Smith presents reviews of one hundred books, which he points out “actually have exercised, if sometimes in devious and very subterranean ways, the most decisive influence upon the course of human thought—and therefore, of course, upon various kinds of conduct too.” He emphasizes that books are included for review “because they have changed or colored the way in which people, even whole nations—as well as individuals—think of themselves.”

The I Ching
The Old Testament
The Iliad and The Odyssey, 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
{color:red} “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

Source.

I'm surprised that Atlas Shrugged was not included on the list. It's easily more influential than a number of others on there.

What does everybody think?

Just how Ayn Rand has been "influential" is hard to establish. As popular as she may be, the fact is, she hasn't substantially informed any discipline or school of philosophy, despite philosphy being her apparent focus, and she isn't regarded as influential even within the domain of American literature, much less world literature.

Ayn Rand was a truculent, domineering cult-leader, whose _object_ivist pseudo-philosophy attempts to ensnare adolescents with heroic fiction about righteous capitalists. :twisted:

Rand did an amazing job arguing in favor of Capitalism on a social level. There are numerous results that support Capitalism dealing with almost exclusively living conditions, wages, numbers, unemployment, etc., but she detailed, pretty precisely, why Capitalism is "The Unknown Ideal".

Rand's books make it quite obvious that her philosophy wouldn't stand without a lapse of reason or self-imposed blinding.

Which is the problem I have with a lot of Rand's stuff and Randians in general, who are often so captivated by her books a blinding might have been easily imposed on them.

I think that a list by popular vote has been done before with the result being an ideological battle between Hubbardites and Ayn Randites, religions and conservatives vs humanists—whatever vs Darwin. In a way, it was representative, since those particular texts were "most" influential to those specific people.

But after a while it becomes more semantics than substance.