Reading list

Sociology: Verso Student Reading

Our Sociology reading for the academic year ahead, up to 40% off as part of our student reading sale.

Verso Books22 August 2021

Sociology: Verso Student Reading

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.

Student reading sale: ends September 30
30% off if you buy 3 or more titles
40% off if you buy 4 or more titles
Discount will be applied in cart. Separate orders can't be combined.
See all our Student Reading here.

 

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See all our recommended Student Reading here.

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  • Classes

    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 ...
  • Crippled

    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...
  • Sociology, Capitalism, Critique

    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...
    Paperback

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  • Understanding Class

    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...
    Paperback

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  • The Debate on Classes

    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...
    Paperback

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  • Building the Commune

    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...
    Paperback

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  • Invisibility Blues

    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 ...
    Paperback

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  • The Anti-Social Family

    The Anti-Social Family

    by Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh

    The stereotypical nuclear family is in the minority of households, yet remains a powerful ideology. This classic of socialist feminism charts how the family reinforces conditions of inequality, and...
    Paperback (2015)

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  • Traces of History

    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...
    Paperback

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  • Class War

    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...
  • Hegel Contra Sociology

    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...
    Paperback

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  • The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations

    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...
    Paperback

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  • The American Crucible

    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...
    Paperback

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  • Lineages of the Absolutist State

    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...
    Paperback

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  • Science, Class and Society

    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 Pareto...
    Paperback

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  • A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things

    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...
    Paperback

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  • Ecology of Fear

    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...
  • Work

    Work

    by Andrea Komlosy

    Translated by Loren Balhorn and Jacob Watson

    Andrea Komlosy argues in this important intervention that, when we examine it closely, work changes its meanings according to different historical and regional contexts. Globalizing labour history ...
  • The Social Origins of Private Life

    The Social Origins of Private Life

    by Stephanie Coontz

    Current debates about the future of the family are often based on serious misconceptions about its past. Arguing that there is no biologically mandated or universally functional family form, Stepha...
    Paperback

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  • Woman's Consciousness, Man's World

    Woman's Consciousness, Man's World

    by Sheila Rowbotham

    A groundbreaking contribution to debates on women's oppression and consciousness, and the connections between socialism and feminism. Examining feminist consciousness from various vantage points - ...
    Paperback

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