A censory experience

This is fascinating, if a little elderly for the web (2005). Human Events.com, which claims that it's been "leading the Conservative Movement since 1944" [huh?], published a list of the ten most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries, as identified by a "panel of 15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders."

You can imagine the top three, perhaps: The Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf, and The Little Red Book. Das Kapital makes the list at number 6, following closely on the heels of The Kinsey Report and preceding The Feminine Mystique. Works by Dewey, Comte, Nietzsche, and John Maynard Keynes fill out the list.

 They've agreed on this socially and politically conservative list. It makes a kind of ideological sense, I suppose.

The Honorable Mention [huh?] includes works that confuse me in one of two ways: Either they should be on the list itself (e.g., What Is to Be Done by Lenin, Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir ) or it's unclear why they would be listed at all (e.g., works by Darwin, Margaret Mead, Rachel Carson).

A third puzzling category exists: I understand why Adorno, Foucault, B.F. Skinner, Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, and Freud would be on the list, but the books they chose to list for each author don't make a lot of sense. Regarding Foucault, why Madness and Civilization and not Discipline and Punish? Why Freud's Introduction to Psychanalysis and not The Psychopathology of Everyday Life or Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality or any book that Freud actually wrote and not a made-up title.

So I'm beginning a list of titles that should scare conservatives even more, starting with Georg Simmel's The Metropolis and Mental Life and Our Bodies, Ourselves. Care to add more?