Reading list

Sociology: Verso Student Reading

Our Sociology reading for the academic year ahead.

Verso Books22 August 2021

Get a head start on your Soc 101 reading by diving into this Sociology reading list including classics like Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil by W.E.B. DuBois, The Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State by Friedrich Engels, and Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson.

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See all our recommended Student Reading here.

Planet of Slums

by Mike Davis

According to the United Nations, more than one billion people now live in the slums of the cities of the South. In this brilliant and ambitious book, Mike Davis explores the future of a radically u...

Imagined Communities

by Benedict Anderson

What are the imagined communities that compel men to kill or to die for an idea of a nation? This notion of nationhood had its origins in the founding of the Americas, but was then adopted and tran...

Prisoners of the American Dream

by Mike Davis

Prisoners of the American Dream is Mike Davis’s brilliant exegesis of a persistent and major analytical problem for Marxist historians and political economists: Why has the world’s most industriall...

A People's History of the World

by Chris Harman

In this monumental book, Chris Harman achieves the impossible—a gripping history of the planet from the perspective of the struggling people throughout the ages.From earliest human society to the H...

Classes

by Erik Olin Wright

Questions of class, power and distribution have reemerged as central concerns in the public discourse. When we talk about class, we don't always know what is meant. Is class about income or affect ...

City of Quartz

by Mike Davis

No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, "Los Angeles brings it all together." To detractors, LA is a sunlit mortuary where "you can rot without feeling it." To Mi...

All-American Nativism

by Daniel Denvir

It is often said that with the election of Donald Trump nativism was raised from the dead. After all, here was a president who organized his campaign around a rhetoric of unvarnished racism and xen...

Crippled

by Frances Ryan

In austerity Britain, disabled people have been recast as worthless scroungers. From social care to the benefits system, politicians and the media alike have made the case that Britain’s 12 milli...

How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century

by Erik Olin Wright

Capitalism has transformed the world and increased our productivity, but at the cost of enormous human suffering. Our shared values equality and fairness, democracy and freedom, community and solid...

Sociology, Capitalism, Critique

by Klaus Dörre, Stephan Lessenich and Hartmut Rosa

Translated by Loren Balhorn and Jan-Peter Herrmann

For years, the critique of capitalism was lost from public discourse; the very word “capitalism” sounded like a throwback to another era. Nothing could be further from the truth today. In this ne...

Understanding Class

by Erik Olin Wright

Few ideas are more contested today than “class.” Some have declared its death, while others insist on its centrality to contemporary capitalism. It is said its relevance is limited to explaining in...

The Debate on Classes

by Erik Olin Wright

Contributions by Uwe Becker, Johanna Brenner, Michael Burawoy, Val Burris, Guglielmo Carchedi, Gordon Marshall, Peter Meiksins, David Rose, Arthur Stinchcombe and Philippe Van Parijs

Erik Olin Wright’s Classes was hailed on publication, by the American Journal of Sociology, as “almost certain to be the most important book on social classes” of the decade. Wright presented a bol...

Governing the World Without World Government

by Roberto Mangabeira Unger

The world does not need a world government to govern itself. Roberto Mangabeira Unger argues that there is an alternative: to build cooperation among countries to advance their shared interests. We...

Darkwater

by W. E. B. Du Bois

Foreword by Manning Marable

Introduction by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

“I have been in the world, but not of it,” W.E.B. Du Bois begins this book, a continuation of the project he began in his celebrated work The Souls of Black Folk, describing the devastation of segr...

The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

by Friedrich Engels

Foreword by Jennifer Doyle

Introduction by Eleanor Burke Leacock

In this provocative and now-classic work, Friedrich Engels explores the interrelated development of the family and the state from ancient society to the Victorian era. Drawing on new anthropologica...

Automation and the Future of Work

by Aaron Benanav

Silicon Valley titans, politicians, techno-futurists and social critics have united in arguing that we are living on the cusp of an era of rapid technological automation, heralding the end of work ...

Workers and Capital

by Mario Tronti

Workers and Capital is universally recognised as the most important work produced by operaismo, a current of political thought emerging in the 1960s that revolutionised the institutional and extra-...

The Wages of Whiteness

by David R. Roediger

Preface by Priyamvada Gopal

Introduction by Kathleen Cleaver

An enduring history of how race and class came together to mark the course of the antebellum US and our present crisis. Roediger shows that in a nation pledged to independence, but less and less ab...

Class, Race, and Marxism

by David R. Roediger

Seen as a key figure in the critical study of whiteness, US historian David Roediger has sometimes received criticism, and praise, alleging that he left Marxism behind in order to work on questions...

Building the Commune

by Geo Maher

Since 2011, a wave of popular mobilizations has swept the globe, from Occupy to the Arab Spring, 15M in Spain and the uprisings in Greece. Their demands were varied, but what they share is a commit...

China in One Village

by Liang Hong

After a decade away from her ancestral family village, during which she became a writer and literary scholar in Beijing, Liang Hong started visiting her rural hometown in landlocked Hebei province....

Invisibility Blues

by Michele Wallace

First published in 1990, Michele Wallace’s Invisibility Blues is widely regarded as a landmark in the history of black feminism. Wallace’s considerations of the black experience in America include ...

The Anti-Social Family

by Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh

Despite much talk of its decline, the nuclear family persists as a structure central to contemporary society, a fact to be lamented, according to the ideas of Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh. T...

Traces of History

by Patrick Wolfe

Traces of History presents a new approach to race and to comparative colonial studies. Bringing a historical perspective to bear on the regimes of race that colonizers have sought to impose on A...

Class War

by Mark Steven

A thrilling and vivid work of history, Class War weaves together literature and politics to chart the making and unmaking of social class through revolutionary combat. In a narrative that spans the...

The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain

by Ron Ramdin

This is the first comprehensive historical perspective on the relationship between Black workers and the changing patterns of Britain’s labour needs. It places in an historical context the developm...

Hegel Contra Sociology

by Gillian Rose

Gillian Rose is among the twentieth century’s most important social philosophers. In perhaps her most significant work, Hegel Contra Sociology, Rose mounts a forceful defence of Hegelian speculativ...

The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations

by Max Weber

Translated by R.I. Frank

Max Weber is widely recognized as the greatest of the founders of classical sociology. Yet whilst his thought is often associated with the development of capitalism in Western Europe or the analysi...

The American Crucible

by Robin Blackburn

For over three centuries, slavery in the Americas fuelled the growth of capitalism. But the stirrings of a revolutionary age in the late eighteenth century challenged this “peculiar institution” an...

The Making of New World Slavery

by Robin Blackburn

The Making of New World Slavery argues that independent commerce, geared to burgeoning consumer markets, was the driving force behind the rise of plantation slavery. The baroque state sought—succes...

Lineages of the Absolutist State

by Perry Anderson

Forty years after its original publication, Lineages of the Absolutist State remains an exemplary achievement in comparative history. Picking up from where its companion volume, Passages from Antiq...

Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism

by Perry Anderson

Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism is a sustained exercise in historical sociology that shows how the slave-based societies of Ancient Greece and Rome eventually became the feudal societies of th...

Claiming the City

by Shelton Stromquist

For more than a century, municipal socialism has fired the imaginations of workers fighting to make cities livable and democratic. At every turn propertied elites challenged their right to govern.P...

Science, Class and Society

by Göran Therborn

Science, Class and Society is the first systematic attempt to compare classical sociology and historical materialism--the respective and rival traditions founded by Comte, Durkheim, Weber and Paret...

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things

by Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel

Nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives: these are the seven things that have made our world and will shape its future. In making these things cheap, modern commerce has transformed, gov...

A Social History of Western Political Thought

by Ellen Meiksins Wood

In this groundbreaking work, Ellen Meiksins Wood rewrites the history of political theory, from Plato to Rousseau. Treating canonical thinkers as passionately engaged human beings, Wood examines th...

Late Victorian Holocausts

by Mike Davis

Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship betw...

Social Class in Europe

by Cedric Hugree, Étienne Penissat and Alexis Spire

Over the last ten years the issue of Europe has been placed at the centre of major political conflicts, revealing profound splits in society. These splits are represented in terms of an opposition ...

Ecology of Fear

by Mike Davis

Counterpointing Los Angeles’s central role in America’s fantasy life – the city has been destroyed no less than 138 times in novels and films since 1909 – with its wanton denial of its own real his...

The Care Manifesto

by The Care Collective

The Care Manifesto puts care at the heart of the debates of our current crisis: from intimate care—childcare, healthcare, elder care—to care for the natural world. We live in a world where careless...

Work

by Andrea Komlosy

Translated by Loren Balhorn and Jacob Watson

By the end of the nineteenth century, the general Western conception of work had been reduced to simply gainful employment. But this limited perspective contrasted sharply with the personal experie...