Human Events online provides us with the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries.

This strikes me as an odd exercise, to say the least, and one which smacks of anti-intellectualism. Books, per se, aren’t harmful–to borrow and slightly alter a phrase: books don’t harm people, people harm people.

The issue here is clearly one of singling out specific ideas and ideologies, more than books per se. Indeed, beyond even the question of what the books themselves might say, but more how they were interpreted and put into practice by persons other than the author (with the exception of Main Kampf). I do agree that ideas can be dangerous, but only, of course, when put into action. The very existence and discussion of ideas, however, is a good thing, as understanding has a greater chance of preventing the deployment of harmful ideas than does the suppression of free exchange.

The idea of proclaiming books “harmful� is to say that exposure to ideas can be a bad and harmful thing in and of itself. I don’t think so. There is plenty to be found in the books in question, many of which I have read either in part or in their entirety, and can honestly say that the consideration and discussion of ideas that are wrong, either in part or in their totality, can be extremely fruitful. Indeed, it is a necessity for someone who seeks understanding of the complex world around us.

Further, even authors/thinkers who were wrong about a lot, can still be right about quite a bit (e.g., Marx). Marx made some legitimate sociological observations about the effects of capitalism and modernization. Further, his analysis of class in a generic sense has some merit. Now, he was clearly wrong about a lot of things, but not about everything. At a minimum his strain of though represents an important response to modernization and industrialization in the nineteenth century.

The book that is the most easy to call harmful, Mein Kampf is hardly worth consideration as an intellectual text, but if we wish to try and understand the horror that was Nazi Germany, then it can tell us something. And I would remind the editors and panel at Human Events: Mein Kampf didn’t kill anybody, and Hitler would have been Hitler had he written the book or not.

I found the inclusion of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (one of my personal favorites) on the “Honorable Mention� list (shouldn’t that be Dishonorable?) was mildly surprising. However, that bespeaks of the hardcore social conservative nature of the panelists, as no doubt they object to the Harm Principle—as Robert Bork did in Slouching Towards Gomorrah.

On a lighter note, Rodney Balko notes:

What’s particularly amusing about the conservative group Human Events list, though, is that not only is each “harmful” book linked to Amazon.com, it’s linked with the Human Events Amazon associates tag, meaning that while these books may be evil, Human Events obviously has no qualms about making a buck or two from disseminating the ideas inside them.

Heh.

Postscript: It occurs to that since I wholly believe that Mill was right about ideas and the importance of freedom of expression as one of our most fundamental rights that I find this to be an odd exercise.