What were the most influential books of the past twenty years? The Chronicle of Higher Education offers a list provided by various academics. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
Without doing an exact count, and of course I have only read some of the books myself, I think maybe, maybe one out of every four books in the list is not there because it reinforces leftist ideology. And of course there are zero books that challenge leftist ideology.
So let me try to correct the balance. I think that Haidt’s The Righteous Mind belongs on the list. Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Trilogy. Probably Richerson and Boyd Culture and the Evolutionary Process (I have not read it, but I think of Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success is a very important book and that book was influence by Richerson and Boyd, so if you’re talking about influential books, . . .). Something from Steven Pinker, probably The Blank Slate. How about Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist?
Anyway, the main point of this post is that it’s very likely that if you see a book that conforms closely to left-wing orthodoxy, it probably is dramatically over-rated in the academy. Conversely, if you see a book that departs from left-wing orthodoxy, I would be that it is dramatically under-rated in the academy. In a more balanced culture of higher education, Haidt or Pinker would be on more reading lists, while the books listed in the Chronicle would be on fewer.
To be fair, the list did include a nomination for Pinker’s Better Angels made by Paul Bloom.
And several of the books on the list struck me as at least not being antithetical to non-leftist thought. The Robert D. Putnam book on social capital seems implicitly conservative as it decries the loss of older institutions. Rather than Bowling Alone, though, my guess is that his Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Italy is the much more influential book, although I say this reluctantly as the writer who nominated the book, Deborah Tannen, appears to have done good work in critiquing academic discourse.
The Irons book on presidential overreach, although I’ve not read it, seems as if it could also plausibly be read as a conservative appeal to constitutionalism.
The New Jim Crow book on over-incarceration would appear to be something consistent with what libertarians have been arguing for a much longer time. Sometimes it seems as if libertarian thought gets hijacked by the left (and the right from time to time) and folded in under their mantles.
Nevertheless, I do very much agree that the list is highly slanted towards the left and that Haidt, McClosekey, and Lomborg are highly worthy candidates for inclusion in any canon.
Four books that I have read, or reread, this year that I think deserve some consideration in these sorts of discussions, are Elinor Olstrom’s Governing the Commons, Why Nations Fail by Acemoglu and Robinson, Poor Economics by Bannerjee and Duflo, and Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia by Jürgen Osterhammel.
Osterhammel is perhaps the least recognized of these but his thorough refutation of Saidian critiques of the west really does succeed in its efforts to, as one review states “challenges the notion that Europe’s formative engagement with the non-European world was invariably marred by an imperial gaze and presumptions of Western superiority.” Plus, a great introduction to a vast number of travel adventurers whose original works are must reads for fans of explorer’s journals.
I’ve read The Righteous Mind and it doesn’t exactly hold up. That seems to be the consensus of anyone that tries to take it seriously. As a simple example does anyone actually believe progressives don’t have a sense of “purity”.
I get the overall jist of what he’s trying to do, and its nice and all. However, The Righteous Mind is mostly a way of packaging it to be consumed by leftists and in that packaging he makes a lot of shortcuts that veer into outright lies or lies by omission. I’m not entirely sure I would recommend The Righteous Mind to people, though there are excerpts from the book and Haidt’s work in general I would.
No academic will ever cite it, and true, I’m talking my book (review) by saying this, but Dreher’s The Benedict Option is already quite influential, and my prediction is that, long term, it’s emanations and ripples will turn out to be highly influential on social outcomes.
Things like this usually show the influence of these particular “influential books” going the other way, a supply feeding a demand, in what I call “the market for confirmation bias.” That’s how one gets normative sociology, normative economics, etc.
The Benedict Option is the only book I’ve seen normal people I know mention in real life.
My wife read The Benedict Option — in the Slovak Translation. Europe’s Christians, and politically the Christian Democrats, are not yet giving up on Christian politics; but there are important insights in The Benedict Option.
I’ve long been following Rod Dreher, but Handle’s critique of him and his book articulate well why I’ve reduced my (limited time) reading of him. I see him articulating a reasonable strategy for Christian renewal, but I don’t see him living it.
–Rod also doesn’t see himself living it; there was a fine blog post about his own greater interest in NY & intellectual blog talk, rather than chatting/ being in communion with the local beer drinkers he was sharing a bar with, while on the net, rather than in personal conversation. I like Rod’s honesty, at times.
I definitely have to second the idea that the Benedict Option as one that should be on the most influential book list. When the Pope (or someone who is essentially his mouthpiece) feels compelled to condemn a book about how to live a Christian life, that should be a big clue that the book is capital “I” important. Dangerous ideas are usually powerful ideas.
OMG, not the whole trilogy! It’s wonderful in its own way, but it’s almost 2,000 pages and the style is, ummm, unconventional. Read the third volume (Bourgeois Equality), which will be most interesting to “intelligent laypeople”–and which begins by summarizing volume 2.
BTW: “the market for confirmation bias” Great term.
What do you see in Henrich’s book that challenges leftist ideology? The Amazon summary and reviews don’t say anything that makes that obvious, though the identity of the reviewers (Haidt, Ridley, Hanson etc) hints that it is popular in a non-leftist social circle.
Henrich’s book is part of a research program that says humans are not a blank slate. Evolution has made their brains in ways that helped them to survive (along with some idiosyncratic stuff). You cannot, contra Marx and Plato, make them the way you want by bringing them up right in the proper social system. Steven Jay Gould used to rail against this as “biological determinism”, giving aid and comfort to Nazis and could-be-Nazis. E.O. Wilson, a conventional liberal, came under attack from Science for the People because he wrote the book Sociobiology.
You might be interested in Seven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002! so less than 20 years ago). The subtitle gives you a pretty good idea what it’s about. It has been influential in limited circles.
Since it is now 16 years old, it does not include any discussion of more recent works like Joseph Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (2015) or Kevin Laland’s Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind (2017).
Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart” should be included among the most influential.
Something by James Q. Wilson. I believe he thought his book _The moral sense_ might be his book of most durable importance, and that book would get in under the 20 year mark.
_Thinking fast and slow_.
_The black swan_.
_Why the west rules–for now_ was significant, though it’s hard to tell what it contributes. Global History is important, but a big problem is that it’s more of a teaching discipline than a research discipline, and its value is largely telling people things they should know rather than discovering brand new things that nobody knew, ever.
But as Thomas Jefferson said, education for a democratic people should be “chiefly historical.”
_The nurture myth_ by Judith Rich Harris.
People who lurk on the West Hunter blog like _A farewell to alms_. I’ve still not read it.
I think _Guns germs and steel_ is a mind expanding book. You can read it without believing in “zero genetic difference” (as John Derbyshire puts it), or without believing that the people in Papua New Guinea are the smartest people on the planet. I like Guns Germs and Steel because it changed the way I think.
I’ve found it useful in teaching, also. The maps totally suck, they were an afterthought. It’s bloated. It’s useful to know that the Aztec were still using obsidian knives in 1492 while most people around the Mediterranean were probably making iron by roughly 1000 BC / BCE. Cheap iron technology probably spread with the Sea Peoples, etc. Late Bronze Era Collapse.
Another book by Charles Murray worth mentioning is _Human Achievement_.
_Consilience_ by Edward O Wilson.
_I am Charlotte Simmons_ for a novel. By Tom Wolfe. If you want to annoy people, suggest that. Are we counting novels?
Actually, The Moral Sense is 1993, so 25 years ago. It is definitely part of the research program I associated with Joseph Henrich and E.O. Wilson above. James Q. Wilson saw the book as reviving a stream of thought that was much more common years ago. He especially points to Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).
25 years? *Tempus fugit*. Thanks for the reality check.
I thought of another one.
_The 10,000 year explosion_ by Greg Cochrane and the late Henry Harpending. 2009.
That title suggests a certain way to look for good titles or scholars who are outside of the academic bubble, based on “countermeasures” and an oppositional approach. What have we left out? Let’s go to the SPLC “extremist files” page and look for serious academics they have listed there (rather than bad bombers or armed robbers or members of gangs, or people who live in bunkers in Montana, armed to the teeth, etc).
Henry Harpending is listed there, so we suggest _The 10,000 year explosion_.
Charles Murray is listed there, so we list Charles Murray for something, either _Coming apart_ or _Human achievement_. _Human achievement_ is certainly a serious book that represents years of diligent effort. I’m not competent to evaluate its overall value, but anyone can learn a lot by browsing it, both in terms of “mundane facts” and analysis / theory.
Richard Lynn is listed as an extremist but I don’t know anything about that guy, and I’m so blinkered I have to remember that Herrnstein and Charles Murray and wrote _The bell curve_ and Lynn is someone totally different. So I punt on him. But let’s make sure to list one book by Charles Murray and also the Cochrane / Harpending book.
ok, enough about the SPLC.
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Deirdre McCloskey is a great scholar and it’s nice to see her trilogy listed. (Disclosure: I am a a fan and she served on my Ph.D. committee.)
Another trilogy worth listing is the one by Thomas Sowell.
_Race and Culture_ (1995)
_Migrations and Cultures_ (1996)
_Conquests and Cultures_ (1998) which gets in just at the 20 year mark .
Methinks Sowell considers his book on ideology to be especially useful. _Vision of the annointed_? Or _Conflict of visions (1997, which is 21 years ago.
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It would be nice to have one book listed by Roger Scruton and one book listed by the late Robert Conquest.
Also something by Robert L Trivers, who has been a bit of a wild man (perhaps associated with his bipolar illness if that’s what it is.
I like his reprinted papers with commentary and introductions. But I believe that came out in 1995 (Oxford University Press?) in a small printing, and the articles are often far older. His paper on reciprocal altruism, for example, is…1973?.
Trivers book _The folly of fools_ came out in 2011. I perceived it to be written for a popular audience and to be excessively polemical (even for me). It’s a good readable introduction to his work on self-deception.
now I’m going to look at the chronicle list–maybe some of the above are so listed.
That list at chronicle is about twenty individually credited entries. Ok, fair enough.
Some other significant titles that come to mind and are likely “outside the academic bubble” might include…
1. Something (something!) by Walter Laqueur of blessed memory. i would tend to say _No end to war_, though perhaps it’s not his best book.
2. Something by Sir Paul Collier. _The bottom billion_ is good enough, but the book most likely to challenge those withinin the academic bubble is _Exodus_. I found _Exodus_ to be even-handed, with issues discussed without malice or rancor.
3. Something by Philip Jenkins who writes a book a year. His book entitled _The Next Christendom_ is getting long of tooth. 2002. though the other two works in his trilogy on “global christendom came out a bit later.
4. Something on the current state of Europe and its likely future, including issues of immigration, demography, Islam, extremism. fiscal health, military security, economic and social conditions, etc.
_The end of Europe_ by Laqueur
_Last Days of Europe_ by Caldwell
_Strange death of Europe_ (very new) by Murray, rather polemical (even Caldwell is less polemical, methinks)
_Europe’s angry Muslims: the revolt of the 2d generation_ by the late Robert Leiken. Alas, he seems not to have finished his memoir before his death. A tentative title was “how I lost all my friends” based on his unpopular research findings.
5. In sociology and education, something like
Mark Baeurlein’s _Dumbest generation_
_Academically adrift_ by Arum and Roksa
and
_Generation Me_ or _iGeneration_ or another title by Jean Twenge.
You have your left-wing socialists… And right-wing Swiss-cheese libertarians.
Richerson and Boyd’s Culture and the Evolutionary Process is from 1985. That’s 33 years ago.
Arnold wrote in part: “It’s very likely that if you see a book that conforms closely to left-wing orthodoxy, it probably is dramatically over-rated in the academy. Conversely, if you see a book that departs from left-wing orthodoxy, I would [bet] that it is dramatically under-rated in the academy.”
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Dude, you buried the lede!
An exercise is to point out the book that people rave about and then suggest one to replace it.
_The New Jim Crow_–too popular. (I’ve only skimmed this)
_Please stop helping us_ or _Winning the race_ or _losing the race_ or _Collapse of the American Criminal Justice System_ (this last I have never read) –these books are not popular enough.
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_Orientalism_ by Edward Said–too popular. (I’ve never read it. Yes, it’s about 40 years old now.)
_Defending the West: a critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism_ by Ibn Warraq–not popular enough.
One of my many crazy ideas is “Pedagogical Adversarialism”. That is, as much education as appropriate – and especially intellectual history – should be presented in the manner of a lawsuit case or dialectical debate, with the best that bost sides can offer (or which they offered at the time), taught by side by side, and with the students invited to come to their own conclusions as to who had the better of the argument, regardless of what the “verdict of history” happened to be. Most of those old critiques are forgotten or lost, and should be revived, to see whether there is any justice to the cultural amnesia.
This is the common way to approach case law and Constritutional law in law school, but it should be implemented much more widely.
A good example of this would be to put John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty up against James Fitzjames Stephen’s Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.
Marvelous idea. We look forward to some highlights from the syllabus