Thursday, June 02, 2005

Human Events: The 10 Most Harmful Books?

Human Events Online ("The National Conservative Weekly") "asked a panel of 15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders to help us compile a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries." I'll go along with several of the top choices, but a number of others seem a bit bizarre.

1) The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels
2) Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler.
3) Quotations from Chairman Mao

OK. Those are easy enough to go along with, but how about runners up like:

14) On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
18) Origin of the Species (sic) by Charles Darwin
27) Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud

I guess lists like this are one of the reasons I don't think of myself as a conservative. Darwin and Mill? Leather-bound coffee table editions of On Liberty were a cliche of the Reagan administration.

UPDATE: Or am I thinking of leatherbound copies of Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith? I may be confused...trying to remember which was the most popular unread book in DC 25 years ago stretches even my grasp of trivia. I think it was Wealth, tho. Anyone have any idea about the conservative animus toward John Stuart Mill and On Liberty? I mean, aside from their anger over the Tragedy of Abolition or something like that?

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