The ten "most harmful books" of the 19th and 20th century

IChing

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Mon Aug-07-06 06:15 PM
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The ten "most harmful books" of the 19th and 20th century

From the Law Librarian Blogg:http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/law_librarian_blog/2006/08/dont_read_these.html

who found this from

the National Conservative weekly :http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=7591

Note: not my comments theirs but my edit on what I thought was pertinent on what they wrote
According to the conservative Human Events,
the ten most harmful books of the 19th and 20th century are:

1 The Communist Manifesto
The Manifesto envisions history as a class struggle between oppressed workers and oppressive owners, calling for a workers’ revolution so property, family and nation-states can be abolished and a proletarian Utopia established.

2 Mein Kampf
was initially published in two parts in 1925 and 1926 after Hitler was imprisoned for leading Nazi Brown Shirts in the so-called “Beer Hall Putsch” that tried to overthrow the Bavarian government

3 Quotations from Chairman Mao
“It is the task of the people of the whole world to put an end to the aggression and oppression perpetrated by imperialism, and chiefly by U.S. imperialism,” wrote Mao.

4 Kinsey Report
Alfred Kinsey was a zoologist at Indiana University who, in 1948, published a study called Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, commonly known as The Kinsey Report.

5 Democracy and Education
John Dewey, who lived from 1859 until 1952, was a “progressive” philosopher and leading advocate for secular humanism in American life, who taught at the University of Chicago and at Columbia. He signed the Humanist Manifesto and rejected traditional religion and moral absolutes. In Democracy and Education, in pompous and opaque prose, he disparaged schooling that focused on traditional character development and endowing children with hard knowledge, and encouraged the teaching of thinking “skills” instead. His views had great influence on the direction of American education--particularly in public schools--and helped nurture the Clinton generation.

6 Das Kapital
Marx’s materialistic theory of history, portraying capitalism as an ugly phase in the development of human society in which capitalists inevitably and amorally exploit labor by paying the cheapest possible wages to earn the greatest possible profits.

7 The Feminine Mystique
Betty Friedan, born in 1921, disparaged traditional stay-at-home motherhood as life in “a comfortable concentration camp”--a role that degraded women and denied them true fulfillment in life. She later became founding president of the National Organization for Women.

8 Course of Positive Philosophy
Comte, the product of a royalist Catholic family that survived the French Revolution, turned his back on his political and cultural heritage, announcing as a teenager, “I have naturally ceased to believe in God.” Later, in the six volumes of The Course of Positive Philosophy, he coined the term “sociology.” He did so while theorizing that the human mind had developed beyond “theology” (a belief that there is a God who governs the universe), through “metaphysics” (in this case defined as the French revolutionaries’ reliance on abstract assertions of “rights” without a God), to “positivism,” in which man alone, through scientific observation, could determine the way things ought to be.

9 Beyond Good and Evil
Here Nietzsche argued that men are driven by an amoral “Will to Power,” and that superior men will sweep aside religiously inspired moral rules, which he deemed as artificial as any other moral rules, to craft whatever rules would help them dominate the world around them

10 General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
Keynes was a member of the British elite--educated at Eton and Cambridge--who as a liberal Cambridge economics professor wrote General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in the midst of the Great Depression. The book is a recipe for ever-expanding government. When the business cycle threatens a contraction of industry, and thus of jobs, he argued, the government should run up deficits, borrowing and spending money to spur economic activity.

Honorable Mentions include:

*On Liberty by John Stuart Mill

*Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F. Skinner

*Reflections on Violence by Georges Sorel

*The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin

*Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault

*Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead

*Unsafe at Any Speed by Ralph Nader (???)

*Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

*Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon

*Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud

*The Greening of America by Charles Reich

*Descent of Man by Charles Darwin

Any questions on why I can't have an intellectual discussion with conservatives? I have read every book here.

The ten "most harmful books" of the 19th and 20th century

"...capitalists inevitably and amorally exploit labor by paying the cheapest possible wages to earn the greatest possible profits."