Poll: The Most Influential Books in the World

Welcome to our poll. Use the check boxes below to choose which you think are the most influential books ever written.

To make things easy, we have given you the top 10 titles chosen by 100 leading academics from around the world, across 9 subjects. You can select your choices from one, or multiple subjects.

Once completed, you will see your results live and check how they compare with others.

We hope you enjoy the poll!

If you want to know about titles in the Macat iLibrary, feel free to get in touch with our friendly team.

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* 1. Please provide your email address

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* 2. Anthropology

Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagos of Melanesian New Guinea - Bronislaw Malinowski

The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies - Marcel Mauss

Race, Language and Culture - Franz Boas

Structural Anthropology - Claude Lévi-Strauss

Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo - Mary Douglas

Stone Age Economics - Marshall Sahlins

The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays - Clifford Geertz

Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography - James Clifford

Outline of a Theory of Practice - Pierre Bourdieu

The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People - E. E. Evans-Pritchard

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* 3. Business

Competitive Strategy: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance - Michael Porter

Administrative Behavior - Herbert Simon

The External Control of Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective - Jeffrey Pfeffer & Gerald Salancik

Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases - Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman & Paul Slovic

Capitalism and Freedom - Milton Friedman

Social Capital, Intellectual Capital, and the Organizational Advantage - Janine Nahapiet & Sumantra Ghoshal

Intergrating the Individual and the Organization - Chris Argyris

Markets and Hierarchies - Oliver Williamson

Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs, and Capital Structure - Michael Meckling & William Jensen

Out of the Crisis - W. Edwards Deming

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* 4. Classics

Iliad - Homer

Alexander the Great - Robin Lane Fox

The Odyssey - Homer

Black Athena: The Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation - Martin Bernal

Homer on Life and Death - Jasper Griffin

The Greeks and the Irrational - E. R. Dodds

The Oresteia - Aeschylus

On Greek Religion - Robert Parker

Rituals and Power: the Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor - S. R. F. Price

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Edward Gibbon

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* 5. History

The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II - Fernand Braudel

The Making of the English Working Class - E. P. Thompson

The Making of the Middle Ages - Richard W. Southern

Lineages of the Absolutist State - Perry Anderson

The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity - Peter Brown

The Coming of the French Revolution - Georges Lefebvre

On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India - Ranajit Guha

Before European Hegemony - Janet L. Abu-Lughod

Religion and the Decline of Magic - Keith Thomas

Nations and Nationalism - Ernst Gellner

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* 6. Literature

Race, Writing and Difference - Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Preface to the Lyrical Ballads - William Wordsworth

The Sacred Wood - T. S. Eliot

The Defense of Poesy - Philip Sidney

The Dialogic Imagination - Mikhail Bakhtin

The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act - Fredric Jameson

Areopagitica - John Milton

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the American Literary Imagination - Toni Morrison

Death of the Author - Roland Barthes

A Defence of Poetry - Percy B. Shelley

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* 7. Philosophy

Republic - Plato

Metaphysics - Aristotle

Nicomachean Ethics - Aristotle

Critique of Pure Reason - Immanuel Kant

Essay Concerning Human Understanding - John Locke

Meditations on First Philosophy - René Descartes

Leviathan: Or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil - Thomas Hobbes

On the Soul - Aristotle

Monadology - Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

The Phenomenology of Spirit - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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* 8. Politics

Politics - Aristotle

Capital - Karl Marx

Two Treatises of Government - John Locke

The Prince - Niccolò Machiavelli

The Prison Notebooks - Antonio Gramsci

The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels

On Liberty - John Stuart Mill

The Federalist Papers - Alexander Hamilton, James Madison & John Jay

Democracy in America - Alexis de Tocqueville

Politics as a Vocation - Max Weber

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* 9. Psychology

The Ecology of Human Development - Urie Bronfenbrenner

Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory - Albert Bandura

The Mathematical Theory of Communication - Claude E. Shannon

The Principles of Psychology - William James

The Evolution of Cooperation - Robert Axelrod

A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance - Leon Festinger

Thought and Language - Lev Vygotsky

Theory of Games and Economic Behavior - John von Neumann & Oskar Morgenstern

The Organization of Behaviour: A Neuropsychological Theory - Donald O. Hebb

The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception - James J. Gibson

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* 10. Sociology

Suicide - Émile Durkheim

The German Ideology - Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - Max Weber

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life - Erving Goffman

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison - Michel Foucault

Distinction - Pierre Bourdieu

The Souls of Black Folk - W. E. B. Du Bois

Folk Devils and Moral Panics - Stanley Cohen

The Theory of Communicative Action - Jürgen Habermas

There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack - Paul Gilroy