Pre­pos­ter­ous Uni­verse fol­lows a tan­gled web to Human Events’s list of the Most Harm­ful Books, accord­ing to con­ser­v­a­tive “thinkers.”

• The Com­mu­nist Man­i­festo, Marx and Engels
• Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler
• Quo­ta­tions from Chair­man Mao, Mao Zedong
• The Kin­sey Report, Alfred Kinsey
• Democ­ra­cy and Edu­ca­tion, John Dewey
• Das Kap­i­tal, Karl Marx
• The Fem­i­nine Mys­tique, Bet­ty Friedan
• The Course of Pos­i­tive Phi­los­o­phy, August Comte
• Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche
• Gen­er­al The­o­ry of Employ­ment, Inter­est and Mon­ey, John May­nard Keynes
• The Pop­u­la­tion Bomb, Paul Ehrlich
• What Is To Be Done?, V.I. Lenin
• Author­i­tar­i­an Per­son­al­i­ty, Theodor Adorno
• On Lib­er­ty, John Stu­art Mill
• Beyond Free­dom and Dig­ni­ty, B.F. Skinner
• Reflec­tions on Vio­lence, Georges Sorel
• The Promise of Amer­i­can Life, Her­bert Croly
• Ori­gin of the Species, Charles Darwin
• Mad­ness and Civ­i­liza­tion, Michel Foucault
• Sovi­et Com­mu­nism: A New Civ­i­liza­tion, Sid­ney and Beat­rice Webb
• Com­ing of Age in Samoa, Mar­garet Mead
• Unsafe at Any Speed, Ralph Nader
• Sec­ond Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
• Prison Note­books, Anto­nio Gramsci
• Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
• Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon
• Intro­duc­tion to Psy­cho­analy­sis, Sig­mund Freud
• The Green­ing of Amer­i­ca, Charles Reich
• The Lim­its to Growth, Club of Rome
• Descent of Man, Charles Darwin

The first ten (through Keynes) are the final list, the rest are run­ners up. Note that Dar­win made the list twice! 

It’s real­ly dumb that things like Kin­sey, Dar­win, Silent Spring, and Unsafe at Any Speed get named as dan­ger­ous books. Dar­win and Kin­sey were just guys, no ide­ol­o­gy, out for the truth. The lat­ter two warned peo­ple of harm­ful things around them. 

Freud, on the oth­er hand, deserves to be num­ber one.

I can see how some of the list makes sense, but what’s wrong with On Lib­er­ty? It lays out clas­si­cal lib­er­al­ism, the sort of lib­er­al­ism which gives us things like lib­er­al democ­ra­cy. You can­not simul­ta­ne­ous­ly oppose Sovi­et and Nazi author­i­tar­i­an­ism and oppose clas­si­cal lib­er­al­ism. Not in at any time in the last 150 years.

As always, when you buy your sum­mer read­ing after click­ing a link here or search­ing in the Amazon.com box on the side, I get a cut. If you’re spend­ing the mon­ey any­way, why not let a lit­tle of Amazon.com’s prof­it come to me in stead.