The New Canon: What’s the Most Influential Book of the Past 20 Years?

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

About this list

The Chronicle of Higher Education, 20 Books

The Chronicle of Higher Education, which is a newspaper and website that presents news, information, and jobs for college and university faculty and student affairs professional invited scholars from across the academy to tell what they saw as the most influential book published in the past 20 years. (Some respondents named books slightly outside our time frame, but were included anyway.) They asked them to select books — academic or not, but written by scholars — from within or outside their own fields. It was up to the respondents to define “influential.”

Who voted?
Paul Bloom | Eric Klinenberg | Peniel Joseph | Johanna Hanink | Jackson Lears | Leon Botstein | Sheena Iyengar | Noliwe M. Rooks | G. Gabrielle Starr | Amy J. Binder | Susan J. Douglas | Mari Matsuda | Steven Shapin | Mark Greif | Ashley Farmer | Nakul Krishna | Richard Delgado | Jonathan Holloway | John L. Jackson | Deborah Tannen | Amitava Kumar

This list was originally published in 2018 and was added to this site about 2 years ago.

View: List Grid Table
Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
6954 Bowling Alone Robert D. Putnam 2000 American English
2929 The Better Angels Of Our Nature Steven Pinker 2011 American English
1699 The New Jim Crow Michelle Alexander 2010 American English
12118 The History Manifesto Johanna Hanink 2014 American English
11817 Freaks Of Fortune Jonathan Levy 2012 American English
11986 What Art Is Arthur C. Danto 2013 American English
3205 Homo Deus Yuval Noah Harari 2015 Israeli Hebrew
5116 Killing The Black Body Dorothy E. Roberts 1997 American English
6363 The Feeling Of What Happens Antonio Damasio 1999 Portuguese English
11986 Paying For The Party Laura Hamilton, Elizabeth A. Armstrong 2013 American English
10959 A Brief History Of Neoliberalism David Harvey 2005 British English
9899 Critical Race Theory Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, Kendall Thomas 1995 American English
12613 The Restless Clock Jessica Riskin 2016 American English
10796 Touching Feeling Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 2003 American English
9219 Ella Baker And The Black Freedom Movement Barbara Ransby 2003 American English
10709 Truth And Truthfulness Bernard Williams 2002 British English
9158 War Powers Peter Irons 1987 American English
8605 Age Of Fracture Daniel T. Rodgers 2011 American English
12375 Shapeshifters Aimee Cox 2015 American English
1701 The Argonauts Maggie Nelson 2015 American English