Sociology Theory

Peter Frase argues that increasing automation and a growing scarcity of resources, thanks to climate change, will bring it all tumbling down. In Four Futures, Frase imagines how this postcapitalist world might look, deploying the tools of both social science and speculative fiction to explore what communism, rentism, socialism, and exterminism might actually entail.

Gay New York brilliantly shatters the myth that before the 1960s gay life existed only in the closet, where gay men were isolated, invisible, and self-hating. Drawing on a rich trove of diaries, legal records, and other unpublished documents, George Chauncey constructs a fascinating portrait of a vibrant, cohesive gay world that is not supposed to have existed. Gay New York forever changed how we think about the history of gay life in New York City, and beyond.

The eighteenth century was a time of cultural friction: individuals began to assert greater independence and there was a new emphasis on social equality. In this surprising history, Lynn Hunt examines women's expanding societal roles, such as using tea to facilitate conversation between the sexes in Britain. In France, women also pushed boundaries by becoming artists, and printmakers' satiric takes on the elite gave the lower classes a chance to laugh at the upper classes and imagine the potential of political upheaval.

From the perspective of Western modernity, humanity inhabits a disenchanted cosmos. Yet the vast majority of cultures throughout human history treat spirits as very real persons, members of a cosmic society who interact with humans and control their fate. In most cultures, even today, people are but a small part of an enchanted universe misconstrued by the transcendent categories of "religion" and the "supernatural." The New Science of the Enchanted Universe shows how anthropologists and other social scientists must rethink these cultures of immanence and study them by their own lights.

Dr. Peter H. Kim, the world’s leading expert in the rapidly growing field of trust repair, has conducted over two decades of groundbreaking research to answer that question. In How Trust Works, he draws on this research and the work of other social scientists to reveal the surprising truths about how relationships are built, how they are broken, and how they are repaired. Dr. Kim’s work shows how we are often more trusting than we think and how easily our trust in others can be distorted.

The leisure class has been replaced by a new elite. Highly educated and defined by cultural capital rather than income bracket, these individuals earnestly buy organic, carry NPR tote bags, and breast-feed their babies. They care about discreet, inconspicuous consumption. In The Sum of Small Things, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett dubs this segment of society "the aspirational class" and discusses how, through deft decisions about education, health, parenting, and retirement, the aspirational class deepens the ever-wider class divide.

Do you have a Third Place? Your first place is home, your second place is work, and your third place is where you go to socialize. As more of our lives are spent online and in digital spaces, these often overlooked "Third Places" play a crucial role in keeping our communities vibrant.

Loneliness has become the defining condition of the 21st century. It is damaging our health, our wealth, and our happiness and even threatening our democracy. Never has it been more pervasive or more widespread, but never has there been more that we can do about it.

What does it mean to look beyond yourself and find a moral cause? To forget about independence and discover dependence - to be utterly enmeshed in a web of warm relationships? What does it mean to value intimacy, devotion, responsibility and commitment above individual freedom? In The Second Mountain David Brooks explores the meaning and possibilities that scaling a second mountain offer us and the four commitments that most commonly move us there: family, vocation, philosophy and community.

Have you ever felt the Covid story did not entirely add up? Expired contains multiple eye-opening revelations about Covid with compelling evidence that provides a coherent, sober, and clear explanation that better fits the data we have so far.

Engine 40, Ladder 35 was one of the firehouses hardest hit in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on the World Trade towers. On the morning of September 11, 2001, two rigs carrying 13 men set out from this firehouse, located on the West Side of Manhattan near Lincoln Center; 12 of the men would never return. The story of what happens when one small institution gets caught in an apocalyptic day, it is a book that will move readers as few others have in our time.

We all notice when the poor get poorer: when there are more rough sleepers and food bank queues start to grow. But if the rich become richer, there is nothing much to see in public and, for most of us, daily life doesn't change. Or at least, not immediately. In this astonishing, eye-opening intervention, world-leading philosopher and economist Ingrid Robeyns exposes the true extent of our wealth problem, which has spent the past fifty years silently spiralling out of control.

In her previous book, Stoned, Raden asked, “What makes a thing valuable?” In The Truth About Lies, she asks “What makes a thing real?” With cutting wit and a deft touch, Raden untangles the relationship of truth to lie, belief to faith, and deception to propaganda. The Truth About Lies will change everything you thought you knew about what you know, and whether you ever really know it.

Economists regularly promote Capitalism as the greatest system ever to grace the planet. With the same breath, they implore us to leave the job of understanding the magical powers of the market to the "experts." Despite the efforts of these mainstream commentators to convince us otherwise, many of us have begun to question why this system has produced such vast inequality and wanton disregard for its own environmental destruction. This book offers answers to exactly these questions on their own terms: in the form of a radical economic theory.

The extensively revised and updated edition of Steven Landsburg's hugely popular book, The Armchair Economist - "a delightful compendium of quotidian examples illustrating important economic and financial theories" (The Journal of Finance). In this revised and updated edition of Steven Landsburg's hugely popular book, he applies economic theory to today's most pressing concerns, answering a diverse range of daring questions, such as: why are seat belts deadly, why do celebrity endorsements sell products, and many more.

In his groundbreaking and controversial book The DIM Hypothesis, Dr. Leonard Peikoff casts a penetrating new light on the process of human thought and thereby on Western culture and history. In this far-reaching study, Peikoff identifies the three methods people use to integrate concrete data into a whole, as when connecting diverse experiments by a scientific theory, separate laws into a constitution, or single events into a story.

Assume nothing, question everything. This is the message at the heart of Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner's rule-breaking, iconoclastic book about crack dealers, cheating teachers and bizarre baby names that turned everyone's view of the world upside-down and became an international multi-million-copy-selling phenomenon.

From political speeches to TikTok trends, from courtroom dramas to the carefully curated campaigns of global brands, Truth & Persuasion unpacks how influence is crafted, consumed, and contested in today’s world. This is a book for anyone who’s ever wondered why some ideas stick, why certain voices dominate, or how we can cut through the noise to find clarity in an age of viral content and endless opinions.

It is widely understood that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution completely revolutionized the study of biology. Yet, according to David Sloan Wilson, the Darwinian revolution won’t be truly complete until it is applied more broadly - to everything associated with the words “human,” “culture,” and “policy.”

Moisés Naím turns to the trends, conditions, and behaviors that are contributing to the concentration of power, and to the clash between those forces that weaken power and those that strengthen it. He concentrates on the three “P”s - populism, polarization, and post-truths. All of which are as old as time, but are combined by today’s autocrats to undermine democratic life in new and frightening ways. Power has not changed. But the way people go about gaining it and using it has been transformed.