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100 Most Influential Books Ever Written

The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written: The History of Thought from Ancient Times to Today (Citadel Press, Secaucus, NJ, 1998, ISBN 0806520000) is a book of intellectual history written by Martin Seymour-Smith (1928 - 1998), a British poet, critic and biographer.

Chronological list

The one hundred most influential books, according to Seymour-Smith, listed in approximate chronological order:

Author	Title	Date
Jewish scripture	Torah	13th-4th century BCE
Chinese classic text	I Ching	late 9th century BCE
Homer	Iliad and Odyssey	8th-early 7th century BCE
Hindu scripture	Upanishads	7th-5th century BCE
Lao Tsu	Tao Te Ching	3rd century BCE
Zoroastrian scripture	Avesta	3rd century BCE--3rd century AD
Confucius	Analects	5th-4th century BCE
Thucydides	History of the Peloponnesian War	5th century BCE
Hippocrates	Works	400 BCE
Aristotle	Works	4th century BCE
Herodotus	Histories	4th century BCE
Plato	The Republic	380 BCE
Euclid	Elements	280 BCE
Theravada Buddhist scripture	Dhammapada (Path of the Dharma)	252 BCE
Virgil	Aeneid	19 BCE
Lucretius	On the Nature of Reality	55 BCE
Philo of Alexandria	Allegorical Expositions of the Holy Law	1st century AD
Christian scripture	New Testament	ca. 50-100 AD
Plutarch	Parallel Lives	120 AD
Cornelius Tacitus	Annals, From the Death of the Divine Augustus	120 AD
Valentinus	Gospel of Truth (Gnostic text)	2nd century AD
Marcus Aurelius	Meditations	167 AD
Sextus Empiricus	Outlines of Pyrrhonism	150-210 AD
Plotinus	Enneads	3rd century AD
Augustine of Hippo	Confessions	400 AD
Muslim scripture	Quran	7th century AD
Moses Maimonides	Guide for the Perplexed	1190
Text of Judaic mysticism	Kabbalah	12th century
Thomas Aquinas	Summa Theologiae	1266-1273
Dante Alighieri	The Divine Comedy	1321
Desiderius Erasmus	In Praise of Folly	1509
Niccolo Machiavelli	The Prince	1532
Martin Luther	On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church	1520
Francois Rabelais	Gargantua and Pantagruel	1534 & 1532
John Calvin	Institutes of the Christian Religion	1536
Nicolaus Copernicus	On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres	1543
Michael Eyquem de Montaigne	Essays	1580
Miguel de Cervantes	Don Quixote	1605 & 1615
Johannes Kepler	Harmony of the Worlds	1619
Francis Bacon	Novum Organum	1620
William Shakespeare	First Folio	1623
Galileo Galilei	Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems	1632
Rene Descartes	Discourse on Method	1637
Thomas Hobbes	Leviathan	1651
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz	Works	1663-1716
Blaise Pascal	Pensées	1670
Baruch de Spinoza	Ethics	1677
John Bunyan	Pilgrim's Progress	1678-1684
Isaac Newton	Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy	1687
John Locke	Essay Concerning Human Understanding	1689
George Berkeley	Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge	1710, revised 1734
Giambattista Vico	The New Science	1725, revised 1744
David Hume	A Treatise of Human Nature	1739-1740
Denis Diderot (ed.)	Encyclopédie	1751-1772
Samuel Johnson	A Dictionary of the English Language	1755
Francois-Marie de Voltaire	Candide	1759
Thomas Paine	Common Sense	1776
Adam Smith	The Wealth of Nations	1776
Edward Gibbon	The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire	1776-1787
Immanuel Kant	Critique of Pure Reason	1781, revised 1787
Jean-Jacques Rousseau	Confessions	1781
Edmund Burke	Reflections on the Revolution in France	1790
Mary Wollstonecraft	Vindication of the Rights of Woman	1792
William Godwin	An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice	1793
Thomas Robert Malthus	An Essay on the Principle of Population	1798, revised 1803
George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel	Phenomenology of Spirit	1807
Arthur Schopenhauer	The World as Will and Idea	1819
Auguste Comte	Course in the Positivist Philosophy	1830-1842
Carl von Clausewitz	On War	1832
Soren Kierkegaard	Either/Or	1843
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels	Communist Manifesto	1848
Henry David Thoreau	Civil Disobedience	1849
Charles Darwin	The Origin of Species	1859
John Stuart Mill	On Liberty	1859
Herbert Spencer	First Principles	1862
Gregor Mendel	Experiments on Plant Hybridization	1866
Leo Tolstoy	War and Peace	1868-1869
James Clerk Maxwell	Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism	1873
Friedrich Nietzsche	Thus Spake Zarathustra	1883-1885
Sigmund Freud	The Interpretation of Dreams	1900
William James	Pragmatism	1908
Albert Einstein	Relativity	1916
Vilfredo Pareto	The Mind and Society	1916
Carl Gustav Jung	Psychological Types	1921
Martin Buber	I and Thou	1923
Franz Kafka	The Trial	1925
Karl Popper	The Logic of Scientific Discovery	1934
John Maynard Keynes	General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money	1936
Jean-Paul Sartre	Being and Nothingness	1943
Friedrich von Hayek	The Road to Serfdom	1944
Simone de Beauvoir	The Second Sex	1948
Norbert Wiener	Cybernetics	1948, revised 1961
George Orwell	Nineteen Eighty-Four	1949
George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff	Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson	1950
Ludwig Wittgenstein	Philosophical Investigations	1953
Noam Chomsky	Syntactic Structures	1957
Thomas Kuhn	The Structure of Scientific Revolutions	1962, revised 1970
Betty Friedan	The Feminine Mystique	1963
Mao Zedong	Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Little Red Book)	1966
B. F. Skinner	Beyond Freedom and Dignity	1971