Under the influence (of the 1950s)

 

"The hundred most influential books since the war?", part two – the Central and East European Publishing Project (CEEPP) being responsible for compiling this list, and the question mark being my own twenty-years-on addition. . . .

As mentioned last week, with the selected influential titles of the 1940s in mind, this "consciously arbitrary" account of intellectual influences in the West since 1945 suggests that fiction's influence has faded away over the years. A novel of the 1950s such as G. F. Green's In the Making has had its day, it seems (or has it?). Its near-contemporary The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848–1918 has had the enduring effects predicted by E. H. Carr in his TLS review: "his interpretations and conjectures, whether accepted or not, will have to be taken account of by future historians".

Fiction aside, though, I'm struck by the reminder here that the Two Cultures debate dates from the same decade as Mythologies, which I now realize I date to completely different intellectual eras, one considerably more tweedy than the other. And by the unlinking of books' lives from those of their authors: Wittgenstein's influence could be said to have only grown after his death in 1951 (Philosophical Investigations appearing two years later, that is, in G. E. M. Anscombe's translation), and it would be over a decade before If This Is a Man would make an impact in the anglophone world (it was published in 1947 in Italy, but only appeared in English twelve years later).

Anyway, see what you think . . . And prompted by the credit given to Doctor Zhivago, here are two tributes to the novel's author by two poets closely associated with him: the personally complicated acknowledgements of influence, you might say, of Anna Akhamatova and Marina Tsvetayeva.

 

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BOOKS OF THE 1950s

22. Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism
23. Raymond Aron: The Opium of the Intellectuals (L’Opium des intellectuels)
24. Kenneth Arrow: Social Choice and Individual Values
25. Roland Barthes: Mythologies
26. Winston Churchill: The Second World War
27. Norman Cohn: The Pursuit of the Millennium
28. Milovan Djilas: The New Class: An analysis of the Communist system
29. Mircea Eliade: Images and Symbols (Images et symboles)
30. Erik Erikson: Young Man Luther: A study in psychoanalysis and history
31. Lucien Febvre: The Struggle for History (Combat pour l’histoire)
32. John Kenneth Galbraith: The Affluent Society
33. Erving Goffman: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
34. Arthur Koestler and Richard Crossman (eds): The God That Failed: Six studies in Communism
35. Primo Levi: If This Is a Man (Se questo un uomo)
36. Claude Levi-Strauss: A World on the Wane (Tristes tropiques)
37. Czeslaw Milosz: The Captive Mind (Zniewolony umysl)
38. Boris Pasternak: Doctor Zhivago
39. David Riesman: The Lonely Crowd
40. Herbert Simon: Models of Man, Social and Rational
41. C. P. Snow: The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution
42. Leo Strauss: Natural Right and History
43. J. L. Talmon: The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy
44. A. J. P. Taylor: The Struggle for Mastery in Europe
45. Arnold Toynbee: A Study of History
46. Karl Wittfogel: Oriental Despotism: A comparative study of total power
47. Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations (Philosophische Untersuchungen)

 

 

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Please join us for Is There Life in the Novel of Ideas? – a discussion on Saturday, February 28 2015, 5–6.30pm, in the Wolfson Theatre, New Academic Building, London School of Economics and Political Science.

Speakers: Professor Peter Boxall, Jennie Erdal, Andrew O’Hagan

Chair: Michael Caines

LSE Space for Thought Literary Festival 2015