The 100 Most Influential Books in History
The Progression of Thought from Ancient Times to Today
By Martin Seymour-Smith
| # | Author | Work | Exegesis |
| 1 | King Wen & Duke Chou | The I Ching | I Ching: A New Interpretation |
| 2 | Moses | The Old Testament | The Last Systems Thinker |
| 3 | Homer | The Iliad & The Odyssey | |
| 4 | Hindu rishis | The Upanishads | |
| 5 | Laozi | Daodejing | Daodejing or The Way |
| 6 | Zoroaster | The Avesta | |
| 7 | Confucius | Analects | |
| 8 | Thucydides | History of the Peloponnesian War | |
| 9 | Hippocrates | Works | |
| 10 | Aristotle | Works | |
| 11 | Herodotus | History | |
| 12 | Plato | The Republic | |
| 13 | Euclid | Elements | |
| 14 | Buddha | The Dhammapada | |
| 15 | Virgil | The Aeneid | |
| 16 | Lucretius | On the Nature of Reality | |
| 17 | Philo of Alexandria | Allegorical Expositions of the Holy Law | |
| 18 | St Paul & others | The New Testament | |
| 19 | Plutarch | Lives | |
| 20 | Cornelius Tacitus | Annals, From the Death of the Divine Augustus | |
| 21 | Valentinus | The Gospel of Truth | |
| 22 | Marcus Aurelius | Meditations | |
| 23 | Sextus Empiricus | Outlines of Pyrrhonism | |
| 24 | Plotinus | The Enneads | |
| 25 | Augustine of Hippo | Confessions | |
| 26 | Muhammed | The Koran | |
| 27 | Moses Maimonides | Guide for the Perplexed | |
| 28 | Moses de Leon | The Zohar | |
| 29 | Thomas Aquinas | Summa Theologiae | |
| 30 | Dante Alighieri | The Divine Comedy | |
| 31 | Desiderius Erasmus | In Praise of Folly | |
| 32 | Niccolo Machiavelli | The Prince | |
| 33 | Martin Luther | On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church | |
| 34 | François Rabelais | Gargantua and Pantagruel | |
| 36 | Nicolaus Copernicus | On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs | |
| 37 | Michael Eyquem de Montaigne | Essays | |
| 38 | Miguel de Cervantes | Don Quixote, Parts I and II | |
| 39 | Johannes Kepler | The Harmony of the World | |
| 40 | Francis Bacon | Novum Organum | |
| 41 | William Shakespeare | The First Folio | The Last Poet |
| 42 | Galileo Galilei | Dialogue Concerning Two New Chief World Systems | |
| 43 | Rene Descartes | Discourse on Method | |
| 44 | Thomas Hobbes | Leviathan | |
| 45 | Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz | Works | |
| 46 | Blaise Pascal | Pensées | |
| 47 | Baruch de Spinoza | Ethics | |
| 48 | John Bunyan | Pilgrim’s Progress | |
| 49 | Isaac Newton | Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy | |
| 50 | John Locke | Essay Concerning Human Understanding | |
| 51 | George Berkeley | The Principles of Human Knowledge | |
| 52 | Giambattista Vico | The New Science | |
| 53 | David Hume | A Treatise of Human Nature | |
| 54 | Denis Diderot (Ed.) | The Encyclopedia | |
| 55 | Samuel Johnson | A Dictionary of the English Language | |
| 56 | François-Marie de Voltaire | Candide | |
| 57 | Thomas Paine | Common Sense | |
| 58 | Adam Smith | An Enquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations | |
| 59 | Edward Gibbon | The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire | |
| 60 | Immanuel Kant | Critique of Pure Reason | |
| 61 | Jean-Jacques Rousseau | Confessions | |
| 62 | Edmund Burke | Reflections on the Revolution in France | |
| 63 | Mary Wollstonecraft | Vindication of the Rights of Woman | |
| 64 | William Godwin | An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice | |
| 65 | Thomas Robert Malthus | An Essay on the Principle of Population | |
| 66 | George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel | Phenomenology of Spirit | |
| 67 | Arthur Schopenhauer | The World as Will and Idea | |
| 68 | Auguste Comte | Course in the Positivist Philosophy | |
| 69 | Carl Marie von Clausewitz | On War | |
| 70 | Soren Kierkegaard | Either/Or | |
| 71 | Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels | The Manifesto of the Communist Party | |
| 72 | Henry David Thoreau | Civil Disobedience | |
| 73 | Charles Darwin | The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection | |
| 74 | John Stuart Mill | On Liberty | |
| 75 | Herbert Spencer | First Principles | |
| 76 | Gregor Mendel | Experiments With Plant Hybrids | |
| 77 | Leo Tolstoy | War and Peace | |
| 78 | James Clerk Maxwell | Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism | |
| 79 | Friedrich Nietzsche | Thus Spake Zarathustra | |
| 80 | Sigmund Freud | The Interpretation of Dreams | |
| 81 | William James | Pragmatism | |
| 82 | Albert Einstein | Relativity | |
| 83 | Vilfredo Pareto | The Mind and Society | |
| 84 | Carl Gustav Jung | Psychological Types | |
| 85 | Martin Buber | I and Thou | |
| 86 | Franz Kafka | The Trial | |
| 87 | Karl Popper | The Logic of Scientific Discovery | |
| 88 | John Maynard Keynes | General Theory of Employment Interest, and Money | |
| 89 | Jean-Paul Sartre | Being and Nothingness | |
| 90 | Friedrich von Hayek | The Road to Serfdom | |
| 91 | Simone de Beauvoir | The Second Sex | |
| 92 | Norbert Wiener | Cybernetics | |
| 93 | George Orwell | Nineteen Eighty-Four | |
| 94 | George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff | Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson | |
| 95 | Ludwig Wittgenstein | Philosophical Investigations | |
| 96 | Noam Chomsky | Syntactic Structures | |
| 97 | T. S. Kuhn | The Structure of Scientific Revolutions | |
| 98 | Betty Friedan | The Feminine Mystique | |
| 99 | Mao Zedong | Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-tung | |
| 100 | B. F. Skinner | Beyond Freedom and Dignity |
Personal favorites:
Inspiration for Beautifully Coping with Life on Earth
By The Alchemist
| # | Author | Work | Exegesis |
| 1 | Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Faust | |
| 2 | Hunter S Thompson | Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas | |
| 3 | Aldous Huxley | Brave New World | Brave New World; Corona and psychiatry – The Colonization of Earth the Prophesied? |
| 4 | Olaf Stapledon | Starmaker | |
| 5 | Edwin Abbott Abbott | Flatland |
