Political Sociology

In The Leap, bestselling author Ulrich Boser shows how the emerging research on trust can improve our lives, rebuild our economy, and strengthen society. As part of this engaging and deeply reported narrative, Boser visits a radio soap opera in Rwanda that aims to restore the country’s broken trust, profiles the man who brought honesty to one of the most corrupt cities in Latin America, and explains how a college dropout managed to con his way into American high society.

In search of an explanation for the crisis that reached an unsettling crescendo in 2020 - a year of pandemic, civil unrest, and political turmoil - National Book Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Evan Osnos returned to three places he knew firsthand: Greenwich, Connecticut; Clarksburg, West Virginia; and Chicago, Illinois. Reported over the course of six years, Wildland follows ordinary individuals as they navigate the varied landscapes of 21st-century America. Through their powerful, often poignant stories, Osnos traces the sources of America’s political dissolution.

In Lady Justice, Dahlia Lithwick, one of the nation’s foremost legal commentators, illuminates these many heroes of the Trump years. From Sally Yates and Becca Heller, who fought the Muslim travel ban, to Roberta Kaplan, who sued the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, to Stacey Abrams, who worked to protect the voting rights of millions of Georgians, Lithwick dramatizes in thrilling detail the women lawyers who worked tirelessly to hold the line against the most chaotic presidency in living memory.

Over the centuries, two important beliefs arose in Europe: a faith that man could order his own destiny and that progress was normal. By 1900, doubts arose concerning traditional Western values. The continuing problems of the world's poor, environmental deterioration, the inequality of women, and continued warfare pose real questions about the advancement of the human race.

From poverty and policing, homelessness and overrun prisons to Grenfell and hostile environments, Britain has long been failing those who need our help the most. There is arguably one unifying theme that links all these afflictions: proximity. Proximity is how close we are to the action and how that affects how we assess, relate to and address whatever that action happens to be. Almost every job requires a level of experience and training with the notable exception of the most powerful people in the country—our political class.

Nobody who works hard should be poor in America, writes Pulitzer Prize-winner David Shipler. Clear-headed, rigorous, and compassionate, he journeys deeply into the lives of individual store clerks and factory workers, farm laborers and sweat-shop seamstresses, illegal immigrants in menial jobs and Americans saddled with immense student loans and paltry wages. They are known as the working poor.

A lauded expert on European history paints a vivid picture of Paris, London, and New York during the Age of Revolutions, exploring how each city fostered or suppressed political uprisings within its boundaries. In The Unruly City, historian Mike Rapport offers a vivid history of three intertwined cities toward the end of the 18th century - Paris, London, and New York - all in the midst of political chaos and revolution.

In the first half of the twentieth century the Keynesian brand of economics, which saw government spending as a necessary spur to economic growth, prevailed. Then in the 1970s, conservatives fought back. Once they got people to believe a few simple ideas instead—that only the free market could produce growth, that taxes and regulation stifle growth—the battle was won.

Investigating the historical roots of our peculiar brand of political paranoia, Arthur Goldwag helps us make sense of the senseless and, in so doing, uncovers three uncomfortable truths: that it is older than Trumpism and will outlast it; that theocratic authoritarianism is as hardwired in our American heritage as the principles of the Enlightenment; and that the fear that our system is “rigged” is not altogether unfounded. A probing, surprising, and critical examination of America’s paranoid style, The Politics of Fear sheds new light on the age-old question: What exactly are we so afraid of?

Urban, divers, kosmopolitisch, individualistisch - links ist für viele heute vor allem eine Lifestylefrage. Politische Konzepte für sozialen Zusammenhalt bleiben auf der Strecke, genauso wie schlecht verdienende Frauen, arme Zuwandererkinder, ausgebeutete Leiharbeiter und große Teile der Mittelschicht. Ob in den USA oder Europa: Wer sich auf Gendersternchen konzentriert statt auf Chancengerechtigkeit und dabei Kultur und Zusammengehörigkeitsgefühl der Bevölkerungsmehrheit vernachlässigt, arbeitet der politischen Rechten in die Hände.

As Reeves shows, the growing separation between the upper middle class and everyone else can be seen in family structure, neighborhoods, attitudes, and lifestyle. Those at the top of the income ladder are becoming more effective at passing on their status to their children, reducing overall social mobility. The result is not just an economic divide but a fracturing of American society along class lines. Upper-middle-class children become upper-middle-class adults.

In a series of 10 essays, spanning five centuries of history, beginning with the conquest of Mexico by Hermán Cortés and ending in 1992 San Francisco, Rodriguez explores the conflicts of race, religion, and cultural identity for Mexican-Americans across the landscape of his beloved California.

Using campus social justice movements as an entry point, Leigh Patel shows how the struggles in higher education often directly challenged the tension between narratives of education as a pathway to improvement and the structural reality of settler colonialism that creates and protects wealth for a select few.

Urban universities play an outsized role in America’s cities. They bring diverse ideas and people together and they generate new innovations. But they also gentrify neighborhoods and exacerbate housing inequality in an effort to enrich their campuses and attract students. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower takes listeners from Hartford to Chicago and from Phoenix to Manhattan, revealing the increasingly parasitic relationship between universities and our cities.

Combining classical Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the new labor history pioneered by E. P. Thompson and Herbert Gutman, David Roediger's widely acclaimed book provides an original study of the formative years of working-class racism in the United States. This, he argues, cannot be explained simply with reference to economic advantage; rather, white working-class racism is underpinned by a complex series of psychological and ideological mechanisms that reinforce racial stereotypes, and thus help to forge the identities of white workers in opposition to Blacks.

How to Be Less Stupid About Race is your essential guide to breaking through the half truths and ridiculous misconceptions that have thoroughly corrupted the way race is represented in the classroom, pop culture, media, and politics. Centuries after our nation was founded on genocide, settler colonialism, and slavery, many Americans are kinda-sorta-maybe waking up to the reality that our racial politics are (still) garbage. But in the midst of this reckoning, widespread denial and misunderstandings about race persist.

From New York Times business reporter Nelson D. Schwartz comes a gripping investigation of how a virtual velvet rope divides Americans in every arena of life, creating a friction-free existence for those with money on one side and a Darwinian struggle for the middle class on the other side.

The world is becoming less religious. Since 2007, there has been a pervasive decline in religious belief and most of the world's people now say that God is less important in their lives than they said he was in the quarter century before 2007. Many factors contributed to this dramatic shift, but as Inglehart shows, certain ones stand out. Utilizing a massive global database, Inglehart analyzes the conditions under which religiosity collapses, and explores its implications for the future.

Author Monica Sharma describes how we can source our inner capacities and wisdom to manifest change that embodies universal values such as dignity, compassion, fairness, and courage. Drawing on more than 20 years of work for the United Nations and elsewhere, she presents a radical new approach to transformational leadership, one that creates systems of change where everyone can engage - not just analysts and policy-makers.

In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, J. M. Berger offers a nuanced introduction to extremist movements, explaining what extremism is, how extremist ideologies are constructed, and why extremism can escalate into violence.