美国“人事”杂志（Human Events）邀请了15位保守派学者和公共政策领袖组成一个评委会，来评比19到20世纪世界“十本最有害的书”（Ten Most Harmful Books）。每个评委可以推荐一定数量的候选书目，然后给全体评委推荐的所有候选书目打分：一本书如果被一个评委列为第一名（最有害的书），得10分，第二名得9分，依此类推。实至名归，马克思和恩格斯合著的“共产党宣言”得了最高分，成为上两个世纪“最有害的一本书”。
1，共产党宣言（The Communist Manifesto）
作者：卡尔·马克思（Karl Marx），弗里德里希·恩格斯（Freidrich Engels）出版时间：1848得分：74
点评：马克思和恩格斯分别于1818年和1820年出生于德国，是共产主义的精神教父。恩格斯起初是个左派富家公子：他继承了收入丰厚的纺织厂，马克思人生的大部分靠他资助。1848年，二人合著了“共产党宣言”，作为他们所属的“共产国际”（Communist League）的行动纲领。共产党宣言把人类历史看作剥削人的有产者和受剥削的工人之间的阶级斗争，号召公认起来革命，从而消灭私有财产、家庭和国家，建立一个无产阶级的乌托邦（proletarian Utopia）。苏联（Soviet Union）这个“邪恶帝国”（Evil Empire）把共产党宣言付诸实践。
2，我的奋斗（德文：Mein Kampf，英文：My Struggle）
作者：阿道夫·希特勒（Adolf Hitler）出版时间：1925-26得分：41
点评：我的奋斗（My Struggle）最初分成两个部分，分别发表于1925年和1926年。当时希特勒因为领导纳粹“褐衫党”（Brown Shirts）搞著名的“啤酒馆政变”（Beer Hall Putsch）而被投入监狱，那次行动旨在推翻巴伐利亚政府（Bavarian government）。希特勒在书里阐述了在德国实行种族主义（racist）、反犹主义（anti-Semitic）的构想，这个纳粹纲领直接导致了第二次世界大战（World War II）和对犹太人的大屠杀（Holocaust）。他设想通过大规模屠杀犹太人、对法国的战争、以及以后的对苏联的战争来为德国在东欧开辟“生存空间”（living room）。这本书开始并没有引起多少注意，但在希特勒上台之前已经很流行。据Simon Wiesenthal Center的资料，到纳粹德国战败的1945年，此书发行量高达1千万册。
3，毛主席语录（Quotations from Chairman Mao）
作者：毛泽东出版时间：1966得分：38
点评：毛泽东死于1976年，曾经在第二次世界大战之前、二战期间和二战后担任红军的领袖，领导为争夺对中国的控制和反共的蒋介石（Chiang Kai-shek）部队进行的内战。1949年内战获胜，他创建了中华人民共和国，以共产主义奴役世界人口最多的国家。1966年他发表“毛主席语录”，又被称为“红宝书”（The Little Red Book），作为他发动的旨在把中国共产党和中国社会推回他设想的方向的“文化大革命”的一个工具。通过强制性配发，“毛主席语录”印刷了几十亿册。西方的左派被书中马克思主义的反美论调所倾倒。毛泽东写到，“结束帝国主义主要是美帝国主义的侵略和压迫，是全世界人民的任务”。（对新华社记者的谈话，一九五八年九月二十九日，《毛泽东同志论帝国主义和一切反动派都是纸老虎》人民出版社版第三一页。译者注）
4，金赛性学报告（The Kinsey Report）
作者：阿尔弗雷德·金赛（Alfred Kinsey）出版时间：1948得分：37
点评：阿尔弗雷德·金赛是印第安纳大学（Indiana University）的动物学家（zoologist），他在1948年发表了论文“男性性行为”（Sexual Behavior in the Human Male）。五年以后，他又发表了“女性性行为”（Sexual Behavior in the Human Female）。这两个报告科学的曲解乱交（promiscuity）和性异常（deviancy）属于正常行为。当2004年一个关于金赛的电影上映时“华盛顿时报”报道说：“1948年发表的金赛报告...震惊了美国，里面说美国男性在性行为上很狂放，按照上世纪40年代的法律，95％的男子都可以认为犯下了性侵犯（sexual offense）。金赛报告包括男孩性行为——甚至婴儿性行为——的记录，说37％的成年男子曾经有过至少一次同性性行为...这本1953年的书还包括四岁以下女童性行为的记录，建议说成年人和儿童之间的性行为可能是有益的。”
5，民主主义与教育（Democracy and Education）
作者：约翰·杜威（John Dewey）出版时间：1916得分：36
点评：约翰·杜威（1859－1952），“进步论”哲学家（progressive philosopher），领导了美国生活的世俗人道主义（secular humanism）运动，曾任教于芝加哥大学（University of Chicago）和哥伦比亚大学（University of Columbia）。他参与签署了“人道主义宣言”（Humanist Manifesto），反对传统宗教和道德的绝对性。在“民主主义与教育”一书里，他用华而不实含糊不清的散文体，他贬低重视传统品质发展和教授硬知识的学校教育，代之以鼓励讲授“思考技巧”（thinking skills）。他的观点极大的影响了美国教育的走向——特别是公立学校——帮助孕育了“克林顿一代”（Clinton generation）。
6，资本论（德文：Das Kapital，英文：Capital）
作者：卡尔·马克思（Karl Marx）出版时间：1867-1894得分：31
点评：马克思生前只看到“资本论”这一大部头著作的第一卷得以出版，他的赞助人恩格斯编辑出版了马克思起草的另外两卷。资本论强行把资本主义套入毫不相称的马克思的历史唯物论中，把资本主义描绘成人类社会发展的一个丑陋阶段，资本家不可避免而且毫无道德的通过致富最低工资压榨工人，来获取最大利润。马克思的理论认为最终的结果就是全球无产者的大革命。他没能预知21世纪的美国：一个建立在资本主义和代议制政府基础上的自由富裕的社会，一个全世界都羡慕并且努力模仿的社会。
7，女性的奥秘（The Feminine Mystique）
作者：贝蒂·弗里丹（Betty Friedan）出版时间：1963得分：30
点评：贝蒂·弗里丹生于1921年，她在“女性的奥秘”一书里贬低传统的“居家母亲”（stay-at-home motherhood），把那比作生活在“舒服的集中营”（a comfortable concentration camp）——那是一种使女性贬值并否认她们真正的自我实现的生活方式。她后来成为“全国女性组织”（National Organization for Women）的首任主席。她自己本来的职业很说明问题，她不是个“居家母亲”，而是一个左翼记者。正如David Horowitz为Salon.com写的一篇关于Daniel Horowitz所著“弗里丹和女性的奥秘的制造”（Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique）一书的评论里说的（David Horowitz和Daniel Horowitz没有亲缘关系）：作者（Daniel Horowitz。译者注）记录了“弗里丹从大学时代开始，直到她三十五岁左右，一直都是一个斯大林派马克思主义者（Stalinist Marxist），冷战期间埋伏在美国的第五纵队头头的政治密友，某个时期甚至是一个年轻的共产党物理学家的情人，那个物理学家和奥本海默（J. Robert Oppenheimer）一起为柏克利大学反射实验室的原子弹项目（atomic bomb projects in Berkeley’s radiation lab）工作。”
8，实证主义哲学（The Course of Positive Philosophy）
作者：奥古斯特·孔德（Auguste Comte）出版时间：1830-1842得分：28
点评：孔德出生于一个天主教保皇党家庭（royalist Catholic family），幸免于法国大革命（French Revolution），他被判了自己的政治和文化继承，在青少年时期就宣布“我自然而然的停止相信上帝”。后来，他在六卷本巨著“实证主义哲学”里首次介绍了“社会学”（sociology）这个词。他创立了一个理论认为人类意识已经发展到了超越“神学”（theology，相信上帝掌管这个宇宙的信仰）的阶段，通过“形而上学”（metaphysics，这里的定义是法国大革命所相信的没有上帝的、抽象意义上的“正义，rights”），达到“实证主义”（positivism）。那样人类自己通过科学发现，可以决定事物应该的走向。
9，善恶之外（Beyond Good and Evil）
作者：弗里德里希·尼采（Freidrich Nietzsche）出版时间：1886得分：28
点评：大学校园里潦草的涂鸦写道：“‘上帝死了’－－尼采”，后面跟着的是“‘尼采死了’－－上帝”。“上帝死了”（God is dead）最早出现在1882年出版的“同性恋科学”（The Gay Science）一书里，但它成了四年后出版的“善恶之外”一书的基本主题。尼采在书中指出人被不道德的“权力欲”（Will to Power）所驱动，“超人”（superior men）会横扫宗教激发的道德准则——他相信那和任何其他道德准则一样都是人造的——然后确立一套用来帮助他们统治世界的自己的道德法则。“生命的本质就是占有，伤害，压倒陌生人和弱者，压迫，严惩，被迫接受自己的样式，兼并，以及最温和的、至少也要攫取”，尼采写道。纳粹热爱尼采。
10，就业、利息与货币的一般理论（General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money）
作者：约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯（John Maynard Keynes）出版时间：1936得分：23
点评：凯恩斯属于英国精英——在依顿公学（Eton）和剑桥大学（Cambridge）接受教育——这个剑桥大学的自由派经济学教授在“大萧条”（Great Depression）期间写了“就业、利息与货币的一般理论”。这本书是不断膨胀的政府所采用的药方。当一个商业周期（business cycle）使某个行业面临萎缩的威胁、进而导致工作机会的萎缩时，凯恩斯认为政府应该增加预算赤字，借款花费来刺激经济活动。富兰克林·罗斯福总统采用了这个观念作为美国的国策，现在美国政府每年的预算使26亿美元，负债80亿美元。
- 九喻 译--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
荣誉上榜的书目（以下书目得到至少两个评委的投票）：
人口爆炸（The Population Bomb）作者：Paul Ehrlich得分：22
怎么办（What Is To Be Done）作者：列宁（V.I. Lenin）得分：20
权威人格（Authoritarian Personality）作者：阿多尔诺（Theodor Adorno） 得分：19
论自由（On Liberty）作者：约翰·斯图亚特·密尔（John Stuart Mill） 得分：18
超越自由和尊严（Beyond Freedom and Dignity）作者：斯金纳（B.F. Skinner） 得分：18
反思暴力（Reflections on Violence）作者：乔治士·索列尔（Georges Sorel） 得分：18
荣誉上榜的书目（以下书目得到至少两个评委的投票）：
人口齤爆炸（The Population Bomb）作者：Paul Ehrlich得分：22
怎么办（What Is To Be Done）作者：列宁（V.I. Lenin）得分：20
权威人格（Authoritarian Personality）作者：阿多尔诺（Theodor Adorno） 得分：19
论自由（On Liberty）作者：约翰·斯图亚特·密尔（John Stuart Mill） 得分：18
超越自由和尊严（Beyond Freedom and Dignity）作者：斯金纳（B.F. Skinner） 得分：18
反思暴力（Reflections on Violence）作者：乔治士·索列尔（Georges Sorel） 得分：18
美国生活的前途（The Promise of American Life）作者：克罗利（Herbert Croly）得分：17
物种起源（Origin of the Species）作者：查尔斯·达尔文（Charles Darwin） 得分：17
疯狂与文明（Madness and Civilization）作者：福柯（Michel Foucault）得分：12
苏维埃共产主义：一个新文明（Soviet Communism: A New Civilization）作者：韦伯夫妇（Sidney and Beatrice Webb）得分：12
萨摩亚人的成年（Coming of Age in Samoa）作者：玛格丽特·米德（Margaret Mead）得分：11
任何速度都不安全：美国汽车设计埋下的危险（Unsafe at Any Speed）作者：拉尔夫·纳德（Ralph Nader）得分：11
第二性（Second Sex）作者：西蒙·德·波伏娃（ѕimone de Beauvoir）得分：10
狱中札记（Prison Notebooks）作者：安东尼奥·葛兰西（Antonio Gramsci）得分：10
寂静的春天（Silent Spring）作者：卡逊（Rachel Carson）得分：9
地球上受苦的人（Wretched of the Earth）作者：法农（FrantΖ Fanon）得分：9
精神分析引论（Introduction to Psychoanalysis）作者：弗洛伊德（Sigmund Freud）得分：9
绿化美国（The Greening of America）作者：查尔斯·雷奇（Charles Reich）得分：9
增长的极限（The Limits to Growth）作者：罗马俱乐部（Club of Rome）得分：4
人类的起源（Descent of Man）作者：查尔斯·达尔文（Charles Darwin） 得分：2
人口齤爆炸（The Population Bomb）作者：Paul Ehrlich得分：22
怎么办（What Is To Be Done）作者：列宁（V.I. Lenin）得分：20
权威人格（Authoritarian Personality）作者：阿多尔诺（Theodor Adorno） 得分：19
论自由（On Liberty）作者：约翰·斯图亚特·密尔（John Stuart Mill） 得分：18
超越自由和尊严（Beyond Freedom and Dignity）作者：斯金纳（B.F. Skinner） 得分：18
反思暴力（Reflections on Violence）作者：乔治士·索列尔（Georges Sorel） 得分：18
美国生活的前途（The Promise of American Life）作者：克罗利（Herbert Croly）得分：17
物种起源（Origin of the Species）作者：查尔斯·达尔文（Charles Darwin） 得分：17
疯狂与文明（Madness and Civilization）作者：福柯（Michel Foucault）得分：12
苏维埃共产主义：一个新文明（Soviet Communism: A New Civilization）作者：韦伯夫妇（Sidney and Beatrice Webb）得分：12
萨摩亚人的成年（Coming of Age in Samoa）作者：玛格丽特·米德（Margaret Mead）得分：11
任何速度都不安全：美国汽车设计埋下的危险（Unsafe at Any Speed）作者：拉尔夫·纳德（Ralph Nader）得分：11
第二性（Second Sex）作者：西蒙·德·波伏娃（ѕimone de Beauvoir）得分：10
狱中札记（Prison Notebooks）作者：安东尼奥·葛兰西（Antonio Gramsci）得分：10
寂静的春天（Silent Spring）作者：卡逊（Rachel Carson）得分：9
地球上受苦的人（Wretched of the Earth）作者：法农（FrantΖ Fanon）得分：9
精神分析引论（Introduction to Psychoanalysis）作者：弗洛伊德（Sigmund Freud）得分：9
绿化美国（The Greening of America）作者：查尔斯·雷奇（Charles Reich）得分：9
增长的极限（The Limits to Growth）作者：罗马俱乐部（Club of Rome）得分：4
人类的起源（Descent of Man）作者：查尔斯·达尔文（Charles Darwin） 得分：2
Ten Most Harmful Books of the 9th and 20th Centuries
HUMAN EVENTS 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. Each panelist nominated a number of
titles and then voted on a ballot including all books nominated. A title
received a score of 10 points for being listed No. 1 by one of our
panelists, 9 points for being listed No. 2, etc. Appropriately, The
Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, earned the
highest aggregate score and the No. 1 listing.
1. The Communist Manifesto
Authors: Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels
Publication date: 1848
Score: 74
Summary: Marx and Engels, born in Germany in 1818 and 1820, respectively, were the intellectual godfathers of communism. Engels was the original limousine leftist: A wealthy textile heir, he financed Marx for much of his life. In 1848, the two co-authored The Communist Manifesto as a platform for a group they belonged to called the Communist League. 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. The Evil Empire of the Soviet Union put the Manifesto into practice.
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2. Mein Kampf
Author: Adolf Hitler
Publication date: 1925-26
Score: 41
Summary: Mein Kampf (My Struggle) 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. Here Hitler explained his racist, anti-Semitic vision for Germany, laying out a Nazi program pointing directly to World War II and the Holocaust. He envisioned the mass murder of Jews, and a war against France to precede a war against Russia to carve out “lebensraum” (“living room”) for Germans in Eastern Europe. The book was originally ignored. But not after Hitler rose to power. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, there were 10 million copies in circulation by 1945.
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3. Quotations from Chairman Mao
Author: Mao Zedong
Publication date: 1966
Score: 38
Summary: Mao, who died in 1976, was the leader of the Red Army in the fight for control of China against the anti-Communist forces of Chiang Kai-shek before, during and after World War II. Victorious, in 1949, he founded the People’s Republic of China, enslaving the world’s most populous nation in communism. In 1966, he published Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, otherwise known as The Little Red Book, as a tool in the “Cultural Revolution” he launched to push the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese society back in his ideological direction. Aided by compulsory distribution in China, billions were printed. Western leftists were enamored with its Marxist anti-Americanism. “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.
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4. The Kinsey Report
Author: Alfred Kinsey
Publication date: 1948
Score: 37
Summary: 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. Five years later, he published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. The reports were designed to give a scientific gloss to the normalization of promiscuity and deviancy. “Kinsey’s initial report, released in 1948 . . . stunned the nation by saying that American men were so sexually wild that 95% of them could be accused of some kind of sexual offense under 1940s laws,” the Washington Times reported last year when a movie on Kinsey was released. “The report included reports of sexual activity by boys--even babies--and said that 37% of adult males had had at least one homosexual experience. . . . The 1953 book also included reports of sexual activity involving girls younger than age 4, and suggested that sex between adults and children could be beneficial.”
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5. Democracy and Education
Author: John Dewey
Publication date: 1916
Score: 36
Summary: 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.
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6. Das Kapital
Author: Karl Marx
Publication date: 1867-1894
Score: 31
Summary: Marx died after publishing a first volume of this massive book, after which his benefactor Engels edited and published two additional volumes that Marx had drafted. Das Kapital forces the round peg of capitalism into the square hole of 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. Marx theorized that the inevitable eventual outcome would be global proletarian revolution. He could not have predicted 21st Century America: a free, affluent society based on capitalism and representative government that people the world over envy and seek to emulate.
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7. The Feminine Mystique
Author: Betty Friedan
Publication date: 1963
Score: 30
Summary: In 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. Her original vocation, tellingly, was not stay-at-home motherhood but left-wing journalism. As David Horowitz wrote in a review for Salon.com of Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique by Daniel Horowitz (no relation to David): The author documents that “Friedan was from her college days, and until her mid-30s, a Stalinist Marxist, the political intimate of the leaders of America’s Cold War fifth column and for a time even the lover of a young Communist physicist working on atomic bomb projects in Berkeley’s radiation lab with J. Robert Oppenheimer.”
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8. The Course of Positive Philosophy
Author: Auguste Comte
Publication date: 1830-1842
Score: 28
Summary: 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.
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9. Beyond Good and Evil
Author: Freidrich Nietzsche
Publication date: 1886
Score: 28
Summary: An oft-scribbled bit of college-campus graffiti says: “‘God is dead’--Nietzsche” followed by “‘Nietzsche is dead’--God.” Nietzsche’s profession that “God is dead” appeared in his 1882 book, The Gay Science, but under-girded the basic theme of Beyond Good and Evil, which was published four years later. 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. “Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation,” he wrote. The Nazis loved Nietzsche.
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10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
Author: John Maynard Keynes
Publication date: 1936
Score: 23
Summary: 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. FDR adopted the idea as U.S. policy, and the U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual budget and an $8-trillion dollar debt.
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Honorable Mention
These books won votes from two or more judges:
The Population Bomb
by Paul Ehrlich
Score: 22
What Is To Be Done
by V.I. Lenin
Score: 20
Authoritarian Personality
by Theodor Adorno
Score: 19
On Liberty
by John Stuart Mill
Score: 18
Beyond Freedom and Dignity
by B.F. Skinner
Score: 18
Reflections on Violence
by Georges Sorel
Score: 18
The Promise of American Life
by Herbert Croly
Score: 17
Origin of the Species
by Charles Darwin
Score: 17
Madness and Civilization
by Michel Foucault
Score: 12
Soviet Communism: A New Civilization
by Sidney and Beatrice Webb
Score: 12
Coming of Age in Samoa
by Margaret Mead
Score: 11
Unsafe at Any Speed
by Ralph Nader
Score: 11
Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir
Score: 10
Prison Notebooks
by Antonio Gramsci
Score: 10
Silent Spring
by Rachel Carson
Score: 9
Wretched of the Earth
by Frantz Fanon
Score: 9
Introduction to Psychoanalysis
by Sigmund Freud
Score: 9
The Greening of America
by Charles Reich
Score: 9
The Limits to Growth
by Club of Rome
Score: 4
Descent of Man
by Charles Darwin
Score: 2
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The Judges
These 15 scholars and public policy leaders served as judges in selecting the Ten Most Harmful Books.
Arnold Beichman
Research Fellow
Hoover Institution
Prof. Brad Birzer
Hillsdale College
Harry Crocker
Vice President & Executive Editor
Regnery Publishing, Inc.
Prof. Marshall DeRosa
Florida Atlantic University
Dr. Don Devine
Second Vice Chairman
American Conservative Union
Prof. Robert George
Princeton University
Prof. Paul Gottfried
Elizabethtown College
Prof. William Anthony Hay
Mississippi State University
Herb London
President
Hudson Institute
Prof. Mark Malvasi
Randolph-Macon College
Douglas Minson
Associate Rector
The Witherspoon Fellowships
Prof. Mark Molesky
Seton Hall University
Prof. Stephen Presser
Northwestern University
Phyllis Schlafly
President
Eagle Forum
Fred Smith
President
Competitive Enterprise Institute
1. The Communist Manifesto
Authors: Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels
Publication date: 1848
Score: 74
Summary: Marx and Engels, born in Germany in 1818 and 1820, respectively, were the intellectual godfathers of communism. Engels was the original limousine leftist: A wealthy textile heir, he financed Marx for much of his life. In 1848, the two co-authored The Communist Manifesto as a platform for a group they belonged to called the Communist League. 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. The Evil Empire of the Soviet Union put the Manifesto into practice.
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2. Mein Kampf
Author: Adolf Hitler
Publication date: 1925-26
Score: 41
Summary: Mein Kampf (My Struggle) 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. Here Hitler explained his racist, anti-Semitic vision for Germany, laying out a Nazi program pointing directly to World War II and the Holocaust. He envisioned the mass murder of Jews, and a war against France to precede a war against Russia to carve out “lebensraum” (“living room”) for Germans in Eastern Europe. The book was originally ignored. But not after Hitler rose to power. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, there were 10 million copies in circulation by 1945.
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3. Quotations from Chairman Mao
Author: Mao Zedong
Publication date: 1966
Score: 38
Summary: Mao, who died in 1976, was the leader of the Red Army in the fight for control of China against the anti-Communist forces of Chiang Kai-shek before, during and after World War II. Victorious, in 1949, he founded the People’s Republic of China, enslaving the world’s most populous nation in communism. In 1966, he published Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, otherwise known as The Little Red Book, as a tool in the “Cultural Revolution” he launched to push the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese society back in his ideological direction. Aided by compulsory distribution in China, billions were printed. Western leftists were enamored with its Marxist anti-Americanism. “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.
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4. The Kinsey Report
Author: Alfred Kinsey
Publication date: 1948
Score: 37
Summary: 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. Five years later, he published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. The reports were designed to give a scientific gloss to the normalization of promiscuity and deviancy. “Kinsey’s initial report, released in 1948 . . . stunned the nation by saying that American men were so sexually wild that 95% of them could be accused of some kind of sexual offense under 1940s laws,” the Washington Times reported last year when a movie on Kinsey was released. “The report included reports of sexual activity by boys--even babies--and said that 37% of adult males had had at least one homosexual experience. . . . The 1953 book also included reports of sexual activity involving girls younger than age 4, and suggested that sex between adults and children could be beneficial.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5. Democracy and Education
Author: John Dewey
Publication date: 1916
Score: 36
Summary: 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.
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6. Das Kapital
Author: Karl Marx
Publication date: 1867-1894
Score: 31
Summary: Marx died after publishing a first volume of this massive book, after which his benefactor Engels edited and published two additional volumes that Marx had drafted. Das Kapital forces the round peg of capitalism into the square hole of 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. Marx theorized that the inevitable eventual outcome would be global proletarian revolution. He could not have predicted 21st Century America: a free, affluent society based on capitalism and representative government that people the world over envy and seek to emulate.
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7. The Feminine Mystique
Author: Betty Friedan
Publication date: 1963
Score: 30
Summary: In 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. Her original vocation, tellingly, was not stay-at-home motherhood but left-wing journalism. As David Horowitz wrote in a review for Salon.com of Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique by Daniel Horowitz (no relation to David): The author documents that “Friedan was from her college days, and until her mid-30s, a Stalinist Marxist, the political intimate of the leaders of America’s Cold War fifth column and for a time even the lover of a young Communist physicist working on atomic bomb projects in Berkeley’s radiation lab with J. Robert Oppenheimer.”
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8. The Course of Positive Philosophy
Author: Auguste Comte
Publication date: 1830-1842
Score: 28
Summary: 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.
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9. Beyond Good and Evil
Author: Freidrich Nietzsche
Publication date: 1886
Score: 28
Summary: An oft-scribbled bit of college-campus graffiti says: “‘God is dead’--Nietzsche” followed by “‘Nietzsche is dead’--God.” Nietzsche’s profession that “God is dead” appeared in his 1882 book, The Gay Science, but under-girded the basic theme of Beyond Good and Evil, which was published four years later. 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. “Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation,” he wrote. The Nazis loved Nietzsche.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
Author: John Maynard Keynes
Publication date: 1936
Score: 23
Summary: 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. FDR adopted the idea as U.S. policy, and the U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual budget and an $8-trillion dollar debt.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Honorable Mention
These books won votes from two or more judges:
The Population Bomb
by Paul Ehrlich
Score: 22
What Is To Be Done
by V.I. Lenin
Score: 20
Authoritarian Personality
by Theodor Adorno
Score: 19
On Liberty
by John Stuart Mill
Score: 18
Beyond Freedom and Dignity
by B.F. Skinner
Score: 18
Reflections on Violence
by Georges Sorel
Score: 18
The Promise of American Life
by Herbert Croly
Score: 17
Origin of the Species
by Charles Darwin
Score: 17
Madness and Civilization
by Michel Foucault
Score: 12
Soviet Communism: A New Civilization
by Sidney and Beatrice Webb
Score: 12
Coming of Age in Samoa
by Margaret Mead
Score: 11
Unsafe at Any Speed
by Ralph Nader
Score: 11
Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir
Score: 10
Prison Notebooks
by Antonio Gramsci
Score: 10
Silent Spring
by Rachel Carson
Score: 9
Wretched of the Earth
by Frantz Fanon
Score: 9
Introduction to Psychoanalysis
by Sigmund Freud
Score: 9
The Greening of America
by Charles Reich
Score: 9
The Limits to Growth
by Club of Rome
Score: 4
Descent of Man
by Charles Darwin
Score: 2
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Judges
These 15 scholars and public policy leaders served as judges in selecting the Ten Most Harmful Books.
Arnold Beichman
Research Fellow
Hoover Institution
Prof. Brad Birzer
Hillsdale College
Harry Crocker
Vice President & Executive Editor
Regnery Publishing, Inc.
Prof. Marshall DeRosa
Florida Atlantic University
Dr. Don Devine
Second Vice Chairman
American Conservative Union
Prof. Robert George
Princeton University
Prof. Paul Gottfried
Elizabethtown College
Prof. William Anthony Hay
Mississippi State University
Herb London
President
Hudson Institute
Prof. Mark Malvasi
Randolph-Macon College
Douglas Minson
Associate Rector
The Witherspoon Fellowships
Prof. Mark Molesky
Seton Hall University
Prof. Stephen Presser
Northwestern University
Phyllis Schlafly
President
Eagle Forum
Fred Smith
President
Competitive Enterprise Institute
