Dangerous Ideas

Wonkette, Brad Delong, Sean Carroll, and much of the rest of the liberal blogosphere has been mixing outrage and amusement at Human Events Online's list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels
Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler
Quotations from Chairman Mao, Mao Zedong
The Kinsey Report, Alfred Kinsey
Democracy and Education, John Dewey
Das Kapital, Karl Marx
The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
The Course of Positive Philosophy, August Comte
Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche
General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes
And, like every good list, some honorable mentions
The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich
What Is To Be Done, V.I. Lenin
Authoritarian Personality, Theodor Adorno
On Liberty, John Stuart Mill
Beyond Freedom and Dignity, B.F. Skinner
Reflections on Violence, Georges Sorel
The Promise of American Life, Herbert Croly
Origin of the Species, Charles Darwin
Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault
Soviet Communism: A New Civilization, Sidney and Beatrice Webb
Coming of Age in Samoa, Margaret Mead
Unsafe at Any Speed, Ralph Nader
Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci
Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon
Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud
The Greening of America, Charles Reich
The Limits to Growth, Club of Rome
Descent of Man, Charles Darwin
Much of the liberal commentary has focussed on what dumb shits conservatives insist on proving they are, but I'm not so sure. I'm a big believer in the power of the printed word. A book can do much more damage than a nuclear weapon. Now when you use the word "harmful," you invite the question "harmful to whom." A lot of us could probably agree that Hitler and Lenin did a lot of damage, but what about Kinsey and Betty Friedan or Auguste Compte for cripes sake?

As I said, I don't think these wingers are so crazy. If I were to pick the one book that did the most damage to the biblical Christian worldview, I'd go for Darwin for sure. As Daniel Dennet has pointed out in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, natural selection is a kind of "universal acid" eating through "just about every traditional concept."

Except for Hitler, Lenin, and a few other bomb throwers, most of the other books made the list because they offend somebody's prejudices and undermine someone's authority. Any important book is going to make some enemies. Physics and Astronomy did their damage in earlier centuries. Copernicus and Galileo shattered the medieval world view just as profoundly as Darwin did the 19th century's conventions. Marx and Freud may have been largely wrong, and I believe they were, but they also destroyed a lot of conventional nonsense.

So, inspired by the example of the conservatives I mock, I'd like to come up with a list of the ten most "dangerous*" books of all time. I will mention a few, but welcome nominations from readers (yeah, I know there are a *few* of you lurking out there - so how about a comment). My initial nominees: the Anabasis of Xenophon, The New Testament, The Koran, De Revolutionibus by Copernicus, The Origin of Species by Darwin. A separate list for those published in the las twenty years would also be nice. Nominations anyone?

* = important

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