The list of the "most influential academic books in history" .... as voted for by the British general public (but from an academically-approved short-list!), in 2015.

For more info see: The most influential acedemic books


The top 20:

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


............ any comments?

Meles meles wrote:

For more info see: The most influential acedemic books

Acedemic ????. Somebody at the Guardian should get a dictionary.

No mention of anything written by Copernicus.

Personally I'm appalled that the huge corpus of work that comprises Germaine Greer's "The Female Eunuch", should be ranked lower that the works of that notorious misogynist William Shakespeare... who himself actually was ranked only just lower than "Silent Spring", by Rachel Carson. The list clearly has a male-centric bias.

But who am I to argue with the great British public?

I don't think that list is ranked according to the public vote, Darwin at 26% was overwhelmingly the most popular.

I'm just confused by how the designation 'academic' was defined but then, so are the organisers.

“This is a fascinating and salutary list for academics – put together by people who work with academic books but who are not themselves academics, it reflects the reality of what a wider public sees as ‘academic’,” said Dr Samantha Rayner, principal investigator on the Academic Book of the Future project, a two-year initiative exploring the future of the academic book funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in collaboration with the British Library. “This may not be what academics agree with – it will be a controversial list – but will, we hope, provoke valuable discussion for the project about the nature and impact of academic books.”

Hmm. Worrying if people really think most of those are "academic" - suggests the project might as well go home.

It's all academic really.

Though if they'd only asked "academics" they would surely have ended up with reference books regarded as the "bible" for each field of study. No medical person could have resisted placing "Gray's Anatomy" on the list, for example.

And Plato's "Republic" would surely have been listed as the great grandfather of all academic literature by many, not just philosophy students - it's been continuously studied now for almost 2,500 years.

I think there should be a mention for Clausewitz's book On War, since this would have a major impact on what happened in 1914.