>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. [ Pause ] >> New techniques supplement, but they never supplant the wisdom that gets contained in books and the power of the imagination that they can create that feeds. So that's the idea, to stimulate discussion. >> Obviously, when you work with a collection that documents medieval world and then the explosion of knowledge that's created by printing, we actually confront a large number of books, at least in yesteryear that have profound impact on the world, that actually shape the way in which people thought and lived. [ Music ] >> It's hard to point to one philosopher as the philosopher that everyone ought to read, but when you're defining it as books that shaped the world, who was the author of so much of this, and I think it has to come down to Aristotle, and how Plato was, of course, a great idealistic thinker who's inspired people intermittently throughout the ages. But Aristotle affected the entire language of, through which almost all of the, what we now call the liberal arts or expressed. I mean, he was, he wrote political philosophy, he wrote moral philosophy, he wrote historical, even social analysis, and he was a philosopher that has a sort of practical, the concept of the Golden Mean. The idea that you take something in between extremes rather than the, than either extreme analysis. And the whole concept of the dialogic culture of a theology that could be explained in human words and in rational form, all of that was central to Western civilization and has spread more widely through the world. >> For me, there are sort of two strains that are particularly of interest in this regard. The first is the Justinian Codes. The old Roman law, and these books were very, very important in the ancient world. They enabled free flow of commerce, mostly, and really helped to unify the world of trade. Then they were rediscovered several years after having been lost in the more modern European context and influenced much of European law as it developed, including, ultimately, our own law through England. >> Obviously, books have religious thought. The Bible, whether it be the original [inaudible] or the King James, the Koran, the Torah. Those books establish a certain culture and poetry and language and ideology that, obviously, has an impact on the world, but if we look at other works, especially if we're talking about the impact of printing in Western Europe, there are works that emerge that are either priority in the history of science. So I would say [inaudible] study of the human body was fundamentally important to medicine. I think the release of Copernicus' study "Revolutionibus", which actually finally provides us with the sun-centered universe, is profoundly important. You can go to Newton and DeCartes. You can go to Locke. There are moments in thought that fundamentally alters the way in which people govern themselves. You can argue that the "Federalist Paper", which is certainly the most important political writing in America in the 18th century, shapes the Constitution that we still talk about today. >> My list of books that shaped the world starts with two American books. One is Henry David Thoreau's "Walden", and the second is Rachel Carlson's "Silent Spring". Each of these books had an impact in later generations. Thoreau was established as an individualist who had kind of an anti-government take, but he also was a pacifist, and his worry about non-violence, published in an earlier essay, was used in later centuries. Rachel Carlson's book really established her as a leader in the environmental movement. >> When you think about books that really shaped the world, you don't tend to think of something that we now look back on today as a charming little pair of operas, "The Barber of Seville" and "The Marriage of Figaro", but, in fact, the play that was behind those two stories by Beaumarchais basically had a serving man outwitting a noble, and it was alarming to the French court at the time and banned for a while. You may remember that Mozart was originally discouraged from doing "The Marriage of Figaro" because of that play being considered sedition. There are those who think that it actually had that affect and helped foment the French Revolution. And then you get the age of the novel making a comeback in the 1800's all over the world. So you see Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky in Russia. >> Nobody can resolve what are the 10 or the 100 or the 1,000 books that shaped, most defined and shaped our world, but the whole purpose of this exercise is for us to better think about how important they are, how important they are in our own lives, how important they are in the whole broader life of humanity and how rich the variety and yet how important the contents of the books that shaped not just our nation but our world. [ Music ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.