Twenty Books that Changed the World

This is one of the 743 lists we use to generate our main The Greatest Books list.

About this list

The “Twenty Books that Changed the World” shortlist was assembled in October 2015 for the first Academic Book Week: a panel of specialist academic booksellers, librarians and publishers whittled 200 titles submitted by UK publishers down to a top-20 line-up, then opened an online ballot to the public to decide which work had had the greatest scholarly impact. During the fortnight-long vote, just over 900 people cast ballots, with Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species taking 26 % of the “900-plus” votes and topping the poll.

This list was originally published in 2015 and was added to this site about 2 years ago.

View: List Grid Table

Rank	Book	Authors	Year	Country	Language
1120	A Brief History of Time	Stephen Hawking	1988	British	English
773	A Vindication of the Rights of Woman	Mary Wollstonecraft	1792	British	English
457	Critique of Pure Reason	Immanuel Kant	1781	German	German
6	Nineteen Eighty Four	George Orwell	1949	British	English
180	On the Origin of Species	Charles Darwin	1859	British	English
1687	Orientalism	Edward W. Said	1978	Palestinian	English
162	Silent Spring	Rachel Carson	1962	American	English
323	Communist Manifesto	Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels	1848	German	German
129	First Folio	William Shakespeare	1623	British	English
1258	The Female Eunuch	Germaine Greer	1970	Australian	English
1662	The Making of the English Working Class	E. P. Thompson	1963	British	English
315	Relativity	Albert Einstein	1916	German	German
1364	The Naked Ape	Desmond Morris	1967	British	English
152	The Prince	Niccolo Machiavelli	1532	Italian	Italian
220	The Republic	Plato	-379	Greek	Ancient greek
1415	Rights of Man	Thomas Paine	1791	British	English
140	The Second Sex	Simone de Beauvoir	1949	French	French
2151	The Uses of Literacy	Richard Hoggart	1957	British	English
531	The Wealth of Nations	Adam Smith	1776	Scottish	English
1613	Ways Of Seeing	John Berger	1972	British	English