The 20 Most Influential Academic Books of All Time: No Spoilers

• A Brief His­to­ry of Time by Stephen Hawk­ing
• A Vin­di­ca­tion of the Rights of Woman by Mary Woll­stonecraft
• Cri­tique of Pure Rea­son by Immanuel Kant
• Nine­teen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
• On the Ori­gin of Species by Charles Dar­win
• Ori­en­tal­ism by Edward Said
• Silent Spring by Rachel Car­son
• The Com­mu­nist Man­i­festo by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
• The Com­plete Works of William Shake­speare
• The Female Eunuch by Ger­maine Greer
• The Mak­ing of the Eng­lish Work­ing Class by EP Thomp­son
• The Mean­ing of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty by Albert Ein­stein
• The Naked Ape by Desmond Mor­ris
• The Prince by Nic­colò Machi­avel­li
• The Repub­lic by Pla­to
• The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine
• The Sec­ond Sex by Simone de Beau­voir
• The Uses of Lit­er­a­cy by Richard Hog­gart
• The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
• Ways of See­ing by John Berg­er

The top spot went to Dar­win’s On the Ori­gin of Species, which Flood quotes the Uni­ver­si­ty of Glas­gow’s Andrew Prescott as call­ing “the supreme demon­stra­tion of why aca­d­e­m­ic books mat­ter,” one that “changed the way we think about every­thing – not only the nat­ur­al world, but reli­gion, his­to­ry and soci­ety. Every researcher, no mat­ter whether they are writ­ing books, cre­at­ing dig­i­tal prod­ucts or pro­duc­ing art­works, aspires to pro­duce some­thing as sig­nif­i­cant in the his­to­ry of thought as Ori­gin of Species.”

Kan­t’s Cri­tique of Pure Rea­son placed a still impres­sive fifth, giv­en its sta­tus, in the words of philoso­pher Roger Scru­ton, as “one of the most dif­fi­cult works of phi­los­o­phy ever writ­ten,” — but one which aims to “show the lim­its of human rea­son­ing, and at the same time to jus­ti­fy the use of our intel­lec­tu­al pow­ers with­in those lim­its. The result­ing vision, of self-con­scious beings enfold­ed with­in a one-sided bound­ary, but always press­ing against it, hun­gry for the inac­ces­si­ble beyond, has haunt­ed me, as it has haunt­ed many oth­ers since Kant first expressed it.”

So you want to write an aca­d­e­m­ic book this influ­en­tial? You may have a tough time doing it delib­er­ate­ly, but it could­n’t hurt to steep your­self in the mate­ri­als we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured relat­ed to the cre­ation of this top twen­ty, includ­ing 16,000 pages of Dar­win’s writ­ing on evo­lu­tion (as well as the man’s per­son­al library), Orwell’s let­ter reveal­ing why he would write 1984, as well as Marx and Kan­t’s rig­or­ous work habits — and Kan­t’s even more rig­or­ous cof­fee habit, though if there exists any 21st-cen­tu­ry aca­d­e­m­ic in need of encour­age­ment to drink more cof­fee, I have yet to meet them.

via The Guardian