Another week, another list. Britain’s Booksellers Association has compiled a list of The Twenty Greatest Academic Books that Changed the World, and now you can have your say in choosing which is the most influential. The shortlist was chosen by academics, librarians and booksellers, and includes classics of political thought, science, economics, and environmentalism. All the big hitters are here: Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Plato’s The Republic, and Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man.
How do you rate a book’s influence? Consider how some of these works changed the world and culture: would we think about poverty and the class system the same way if it hadn’t been for The Wealth of Nations and The Communist Manifesto? Could anyone walk into an art gallery and stare at nudes in the same way after reading Ways of Seeing? Feminism got a boost from Wollstonecraft’s book, but also from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. The results of the poll will be announced during Academic Book Week, November 9 – 16.
- 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 Origins of Species by Charles Darwin
- Orientalism by Edward Said
- Silent Spring
by Rachel Carson
- The Communist Manifesto by Marx & Engels
- Complete Works, 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
