Peripheral Vision: Key Books of the 20th Century

what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.

So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Thursday, March 19, 2015

Key Books of the 20th Century - Part I

For the past few days I’ve been engaged in a frustrating and probably useless task – trying to list the non-fiction books I think worthy of consideration as the "seminal books" of the last century….for English-speakers. This links to a table you will find on page 2 of the paper "Ways of Seeing...the Global Crisis" which tries to give a sense of the key debates of the post war period........

Any such list has to be arbitrary since league tables of book purchases or library loans are difficult to get hold of, unreliable and nationally biased. And note the dual (rather heavy) qualifications "I think" and "worthy of consideration"..... it is a list drawn up by a white male who had a Scottish university education (in politics and economics) in the early 1960s and is limited therefore by that interest in political economy – rather than, for example, psychology…. (although I have included the injunctions of Dale Carnegie and Benjamin Spock as well as the more thoughtful analyses of Carl Rodgers)
But "Mein Kampf" and the writings of Ann Raynd are excluded - despite the influence they had...... I simply can't view them as serious.....

My surfing did unearth some “mega-lists” generated from 107 "best of" book lists from a variety of sources eg this one which is, however, strongly biased to American reading….

As a starter, let me offer this list of 35 books – taking us to 1973.

Political Parties – Robert Michels (1913)

Public Opinion - Walter Lippmann (1921)
Revolt of the Masses - Jose Ortega y Gasset (1930)

Moral Man and Immoral Society - Reinhold Niebuhr (1932)
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money - JM Keynes (1936)

How to make friends and influence people - Dale Carnegie (1936)
The Managerial Revolution – James Burnham (1941)

Escape from Freedom - Erich Fromm (1941)
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy – Joseph Schumpeter (1942)

The Open Society and its Enemies - Karl Popper (1944)

The Road to Serfdom - Friedrich Hayek (1944)

Baby and Child Care - Benjamin Spock (1946)

Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male – Kinsey (1948)

The Second Sex - Simone de Beauvoir (19949)
The Lonely Crowd - David Riesmann (1950)

The Power Elite – C Wright Mills (1956)