The Hundred Most Influential Books Since The War (TLS)
List produced by the Central and East European Publishing Project (CEEPP) and published in the Times Literary Supplement.
BOOKS OF THE 1940s
1. Simone de Beauvoir: The Second Sex (Le Deuxieme Sexe)
2. Marc Bloch: The Historian’s Craft (Apologie pour l’historie, ou, Metier d’ historien)
3. Fernand Braudel: The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (La Mediterranee et le monde mediterraneen a l’epoque de Philippe II)
4. James Burnham: The Managerial Revolution
5. Albert Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus (Le Mythe de Sisyphe)
6. Albert Camus: The Outsider (L’Etranger)
7. R. G. Collingwood: The Idea of History
8. Erich Fromm: The Fear of Freedom (Die Furcht vor der Freiheit)
9. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno: Dialectic of Enlightenment (Dialektik der Aufklaerung)
10. Karl Jaspers: The Perennial Scope of Philosophy (Der philosophische Glaube)
11. Arthur Koestler: Darkness at Noon
12. Andre Malraux: Man’s Fate (La Condition humaine)
13. Franz Neumann: Behemoth: The structure and practice of National Socialism
14. George Orwell: Animal Farm
15. George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-four
16. Karl Polanyi: The Great Transformation
17. Karl Popper: The Open Society and Its Enemies
18. Paul Samuelson: Economics: An introductory analysis
19. Jean-Paul Sartre: Existentialism and Humanism (L’Existentialisme est un humanisme)
20. Joseph Schumpeter: Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
21. Martin Wright: Power Politics
BOOKS OF THE 1950s
22. Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism
23. Raymond Aron: The Opium of the Intellectuals (L’Opium des intellectuels)
24. Kenneth Arrow: Social Choice and Individual Values
25. Roland Barthes: Mythologies
26. Winston Churchill: The Second World War
27. Norman Cohn: The Pursuit of the Millennium
28. Milovan Djilas: The New Class: An analysis of the Communist system
29. Mircea Eliade: Images and Symbols (Images et symboles)
30. Erik Erikson: Young Man Luther: A study in psychoanalysis and history
31. Lucien Febvre: The Struggle for History (Combat pour l’histoire)
32. John Kenneth Galbraith: The Affluent Society
33. Erving Goffman: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
34. Arthur Koestler and Richard Crossman (eds): The God That Failed: Six studies in Communism
35. Primo Levi: If This Is a Man (Se questo un uomo)
36. Claude Levi-Strauss: A World on the Wane (Tristes tropiques)
37. Czeslaw Milosz: The Captive Mind (Zniewolony umysl)
38. Boris Pasternak: Doctor Zhivago
39. David Riesman: The Lonely Crowd
40. Herbert Simon: Models of Man, Social and Rational
41. C. P. Snow: The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution
42. Leo Strauss: Natural Right and History
43. J. L. Talmon: The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy
44. A. J. P. Taylor: The Struggle for Mastery in Europe
45. Arnold Toynbee: A Study of History
46. Karl Wittfogel: Oriental Despotism: A comparative study of total power
47. Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations (Philosophische Untersuchungen)
BOOKS OF THE 1960s
48. Hannah Arendt: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil
49. Daniel Bell: The End of Ideology
50. Isaiah Berlin: Four Essays on Liberty
51. Albert Camus: Notebooks
19351951 (Carnets)
52. Elias Canetti: Crowds and Power (Masse und Macht)
53. Robert Dahl: Who Governs?: Democracy and power in an American city
54. Mary Douglas: Purity and Danger
55. Erik Erikson: Gandhi’s Truth: On the origins of militant nonviolence
56. Michel Foucault: Madness and civilization: A history of insanity in the Age of Reason (Histoire de la folie a l’age classique)
57. Milton Friedman: Capitalism and Freedom
58. Alexander Gerschenkron: Economic Backwardness in Historial Perspective
59. Antonio Gramsci: Prison Notebooks (Quaderni del carcere)
60. H. L. A. Hart: The Concept of Law
61. Friedrich von Hayek: The Constitution of Liberty (Die Verfassung der Freiheit)
62. Jane Jacobs: The Death and Life of Great American Cities
63. Carl Gustav Jung: Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Erinnerungen, Traeume, Gedanken)
64. Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
65. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie: The Peasants of Languedoc (Les Paysans de Languedoc)
66. Claude Levi-Strauss: The Savage Mind (Le Pensee sauvage)
67. Konrad Lorenz: On Aggression (Das sogenannte Boese)
68. Thomas Schelling: The Strategy of Conflict
69. Fritz Stern: The Politics of Cultural Despair
70. E. P. Thompson: The Making of the English Working Class
BOOKS OF THE 1970s
71. Daniel Bell: The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism
72. Isaiah Berlin: Russian Thinkers
73. Ronald Dworkin: Taking Rights Seriously
74. Clifford Geertz: The Interpretation of Cultures
75. Albert Hirschman: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty
76. Leszek Kolakowski: Main Currents of Marxism (Glowne nurty marksizmu)
77. Hans Kueng: On Being a Christian (Christ Sein)
78. Robert Nozick: Anarchy, State and Utopia
79. John Rawls: A Theory of Justice
80. Gershom Scholem: The Messianic Idea in Judaism, and other essays on Jewish spirituality
81. Ernst Friedrich Schumacher: Small Is Beautiful
82. Tibor Scitovsky: The Joyless Economy
83. Quentin Skinner: The Foundations of Modern Political Thought
84. Alexander Solzhenitsyn: The Gulag Archipelago
85. Keith Thomas: Religion and the Decline of Magic
BOOKS OF THE 1980s and beyond:
86. Raymond Aron: Memoirs (Memoires)
87. Peter Berger: The Capitalist Revolution: Fifty propositions about prosperity, equality and liberty
88. Norberto Bobbio: The Future of Democracy (Il futuro della democrazia)
89. Karl Dietrich Bracher: The Totalitarian Experience (Die totalitaere Erfahrung)
90. John Eatwell, Murray Milgate and Peter Newman (eds): The New Palgrave: The world of economics)
91. Ernest Gellner: Nations and Nationalism
92. Vaclav Havel: Living in Truth
93. Stephen Hawking: A Brief History of Time
94. Paul Kennedy: The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
95. Milan Kundera: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
96. Primo Levi: The Drowned and the Saved (I sommersi e i salvati)
97. Roger Penrose: The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning computers, minds, and the laws of physics
98. Richard Rorty: Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
99. Amartya Sen: Resources, Values and Development
100. Michael Walzer: Spheres of Justice
Certain seminal works which were published before the Second World War but which have had a major influence since the war were set aside. That list would certainly include:
Karl Barth: Credo
Marc Bloch: Feudal Society (La Societe feodale)
Martin Buber: I and Thou (Ich und Du)
Norbert Elias: The Civilizing Process (Uber den Prozess der Zivilisation)
Sigmund Freud: Civilization and Its Discontents (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur)
Elie Halevy: The Era of Tyrannies: Essays on socialism and war (L’ire des tyrannies: Etudes sur le socialisme et la guerre)
Martin Heidegger: Being and Time (Sein und Zeit)
Johan Huizinga: The Waning of the Middle Ages (Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen)
Aldous Huxley: Brave New World
Franz Kafka: The Castle (Das Schloss)
John Maynard Keynes: The Economic Consequences of the Peace
John Maynard Keynes: The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
Lewis Namier: The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III
Jose Ortega y Gasset: The Revolt of the Masses (La Rebelion de las masas)
Karl Popper: The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Logik der Forschung)
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Tractatus logico-philosophicus (Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung)