Tuesday, June 21, 2011

OK, so I had to make it 25 books

In the order in which they were published:
  1. G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of History
  2. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals
  3. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
  4. George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
  5. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation
  6. Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological
  7. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History
  8. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
  9. Joan Didion, Slouching Toward Bethlehem
  10. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism
  11. Christopher Lasch, Culture of Narcissism
  12. Ryszard Kapuściński, Shah of Shahs
  13. Stephen J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man
  14. Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History
  15. Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert
  16. Paul Fussell, Class
  17. Griel Marcus, Lipstick Traces
  18. Donna Haraway, Primate Visions
  19. Mike Davis, City of Quartz
  20. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
  21. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity
  22. James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine
  23. James Scott, Seeing Like a State
  24. John Robb, Brave New War
  25. Misha Glenny, McMafia
And, if I really had to boil it down to the ten that probably most influence my thinking today (not necessarily the same as the ones who made the biggest impression on me when I read the book), it would probably be Nietzsche, Polanyi, Canguilhem, Kuhn, Bell, Davis, Jameson, Ferguson, Scott, and Robb.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very Shallow...If you can probe below the surface of Plato's time...then you will have a very different list...Challange Plato the person and not the theorist...and republish...

Justin Boland said...

Well, I thought this list was pretty superb, so between me and this courageous anonymous commentator, you're back at zero.