Sometimes, books everyone pays attention to wind up causing as many problems as they are meant to correct. Author Benjamin Wiker offers a list of 10 that should be read, he believes -- so that the ideas in them can be recognized as folly and avoided. His 2008 10 Books That Screwed up the World offers a brief sketch of the offenders and what's come about as people accepted their messages and thoughts uncritically.

For example, Machiavelli's The Prince suggested adapting evil's methods to achieve good's ends, Wiker says. That's not so bad at low levels, but follow the logic to the end and you get concentration camps, gulags and Mao Zedong's deadly Cultural Revolution. All of those are bad. Other books on his list also offered ideas that may have been relatively beneficial in the small doses or on the small scales which concerned their authors, but which when carried forward to their conclusions can result in sometimes monstrous evils. And of course some books, like Karl Marx and Friederich Engels' The Manifesto of the Communist Party, wind up wrong-headed because they start out that way.

Again, Wiker doesn't suggest these books should be banned or even that they should be avoided. Reading them is the only way to know what's in them and counter their harmful influence. His tone isn't always as temperate as you might wish for a scholarly evaluation, but he's not doing one of those as much as he is a highbrow polemic. Whether or not that makes 10 Books That Screwed up the World a candidate for someone else's list of such books is up to the reader to determine.

Original available here.