“What are the best Sociology Books?” We looked at 467 of the top Sociology books, aggregating and ranking them so we could answer that very question!

Sociology is the latest scientific subject for us to cover. We have slowly built up a nice little backlog of other sciences, Statistics, Entomology, Astronomy, Physics, Evolution, Botany, Quantum Physics, and several more scientific areas.

The top 18 books, all appearing on 3 or more “Best Sociology” book lists, are below arranged by the number of times they appear. The remaining 400+ books, as well as the sources we used, can be found in alphabetical order on the bottom of the page.

Happy Scrolling!

Top 18 Sociology Books

18 .) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam

Lists It Appears On:

• We Speak For Earth
• Goodreads
• Goodreads 2

“Once we bowled in leagues, usually after work—but no longer. This seemingly small phenomenon symbolizes a significant social change that Robert Putnam has identified in this brilliant volume, which The Economist hailed as “a prodigious achievement.”

Drawing on vast new data that reveal Americans’ changing behavior, Putnam shows how we have become increasingly disconnected from one another and how social structures—whether they be PTA, church, or political parties—have disintegrated. Until the publication of this groundbreaking work, no one had so deftly diagnosed the harm that these broken bonds have wreaked on our physical and civic health, nor had anyone exalted their fundamental power in creating a society that is happy, healthy, and safe. “

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17 .) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson

Lists It Appears On:

• List Muse
• Goodreads
• Goodreads 2

“The full magnitude of Benedict Anderson’s intellectual achievement is still being appreciated and debated. Imagined Communities remains the most influential book on the origins of nationalism, filling the vacuum that previously existed in the traditions of Western thought. Cited more often than any other single English-language work in the human sciences, it is read around the world in more than thirty translations.

Written with exemplary clarity, this illuminating study traces the emergence of community as an idea to South America, rather than to nineteenth-century Europe. Later, this sense of belonging was formed and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular culture, through print, literature, maps and museums. Following the rise and conflict of nations and the decline of empires, Anderson draws on examples from South East Asia, Latin America and Europe’s recent past to show how nationalism shaped the modern world.”

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16 .) Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason by Michel Foucault

Lists It Appears On:

• We Speak For Earth
• Goodreads
• Goodreads 2

Michel Foucault examines the archeology of madness in the West from 1500 to 1800 – from the late Middle Ages, when insanity was still considered part of everyday life and fools and lunatics walked the streets freely, to the time when such people began to be considered a threat, asylums were first built, and walls were erected between the “insane” and the rest of humanity.

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15 .) Rules of the Sociological Method by Emile Durkheim

Lists It Appears On:

• Social Science Careers
• Goodreads 2
• We Speak For Earth

“he Rules of Sociological Method represents Emile Durkheim’s manifesto for sociology. He argues forcefully for the objective, scientific, and methodological underpinnings of sociology as a discipline and establishes guiding principles for future research.

The substantial new introduction by leading Durkheim scholar Steven Lukes explains and sets into context Durkheim’s arguments. Lukes examines the still-controversial debates about The Rules of Sociological Method’s six chapters and explains their relevance to present-day sociology. The edition also includes Durkheim’s subsequent thoughts on method in the form of articles, debates with scholars from other disciplines, and letters. The original translation has been revised and reworked in order to make Durkheim’s arguments clearer and easier to read. “

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14 .) Sociology by Anthony Giddens

Lists It Appears On:

• Clear IAS
• List Muse
• Goodreads 2

Introduction to Sociology focuses only on what students need to know in order to master the sociological concepts taught in the introductory course. Each chapter in the Tenth Edition follows the same consistent four-part structure: First, the authors introduce the basic concepts before discussing sociological theory. They then turn their attention to current research and finally wrap up by exploring unanswered questions that face sociologists today. This consistent, thoughtful organization―coupled with learning objectives, Concept Checks, and Big Picture concept maps―keeps students focused on the core concepts. Now supported by InQuizitive, the Tenth Edition builds on the book’s long-standing strengths: emphasis on linking micro and macro sociology, coverage of the best recent research, and an exceptionally affordable price relative to other comprehensive texts.

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13 .) Sociology: Themes And Perspectives by Michael Haralambos

Lists It Appears On:

• Clear IAS
• Nice IAS
• Goodreads

The eighth edition of this essential resource covers new and completely up-to-date sociological teaching, with the latest research, empirical studies and theoretical developments, includes new Chapter ‘Development and Globalisation’.

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12 .) Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity by Erving Goffman

Lists It Appears On:

• We Speak For Earth
• The Society Pages
• Goodreads 2

“Stigma is an illuminating excursion into the situation of persons who are unable to conform to standards that society calls normal. Disqualified from full social acceptance, they are stigmatized individuals. Physically deformed people, ex-mental patients, drug addicts, prostitutes, or those ostracized for other reasons must constantly strive to adjust to their precarious social identities. Their image of themselves must daily confront and be affronted by the image which others reflect back to them.

Drawing extensively on autobiographies and case studies, sociologist Erving Goffman analyzes the stigmatized person’s feelings about himself and his relationship to “normals” He explores the variety of strategies stigmatized individuals employ to deal with the rejection of others, and the complex sorts of information about themselves they project. In Stigma the interplay of alternatives the stigmatized individual must face every day is brilliantly examined by one of America’s leading social analysts.”

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11 .) The Civilizing Process by Norbert Elias

Lists It Appears On:

• ISA
• List Muse
• The Society Pages

The Civilizing Process stands out as Norbert Elias’ greatest work, tracing the “civilizing” of manners and personality in Western Europe since the late Middle Ages by demonstrating how the formation of states and the monopolization of power within them changed Western society forever.

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10 .) The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman

Lists It Appears On:

• We Speak For Earth
• List Muse
• The Society Pages

The Lonely Crowd is considered by many to be the most influential book of the twentieth century. Its now-classic analysis of the “new middle class” in terms of inner-directed and other-directed social character opened exciting new dimensions in our understanding of the psychological, political, and economic problems that confront the individual in contemporary American society. The 1969 abridged and revised edition of the book is now reissued with a new foreword by Todd Gitlin that explains why the book is still relevant to our own era.

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9 .) The Social Construction of Reality by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann

Lists It Appears On:

• We Speak For Earth
• ISA
• List Muse

Called the “fifth-most important sociological book of the 20th century” by the International Sociological Association, this groundbreaking study of knowledge introduces the concept of “social construction” into the social sciences for the first time. In it, Berger and Luckmann reformulate the task of the sociological subdicipline that, since Max Scheler, has been known as the sociology of knowledge.

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8 .) The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard G. Wilkinson; Kate Pickett

Lists It Appears On:

• Real Sociology
• List Muse
• Goodreads 2

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone is the most influential and talked-about book on society in the last decade – now updated with a new chapter on the controversy the book has ignited. Why do we mistrust people more in the UK than in Japan? Why do Americans have higher rates of teenage pregnancy than the French? What makes the Swedish thinner than the Australians?

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7 .) The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations by James Surowiecki

Lists It Appears On:

• We Speak For Earth
• Goodreads 2
• Ranker

“In this endlessly fascinating book, New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea that has profound implications: large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant—better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future.

This seemingly counterintuitive notion has endless and major ramifications for how businesses operate, how knowledge is advanced, how economies are (or should be) organized and how we live our daily lives. With seemingly boundless erudition and in delightfully clear prose, Surowiecki ranges across fields as diverse as popular culture, psychology, ant biology, economic behaviorism, artificial intelligence, military history and political theory to show just how this principle operates in the real world.

Despite the sophistication of his arguments, Surowiecki presents them in a wonderfully entertaining manner. The examples he uses are all down-to-earth, surprising, and fun to ponder. Why is the line in which you’re standing always the longest? Why is it that you can buy a screw anywhere in the world and it will fit a bolt bought ten-thousand miles away? Why is network television so awful? If you had to meet someone in Paris on a specific day but had no way of contacting them, when and where would you meet? Why are there traffic jams? What’s the best way to win money on a game show? Why, when you walk into a convenience store at 2:00 A.M. to buy a quart of orange juice, is it there waiting for you? What do Hollywood mafia movies have to teach us about why corporations exist?”

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6 .) Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology by Max Weber

Lists It Appears On:

• Ranker
• ISA
• Social Science Careers
• Goodreads 2

“Published posthumously in the early 1920’s, Max Weber’s Economy and Society has since become recognized as one of the greatest sociological treatises of the 20th century, as well as a foundational text of the modern sociological imagination.

The first strictly empirical comparison of social structures and normative orders conducted in world-historical depth, this two volume set of Economy and Society—now with new introductory material contextualizing Weber’s work for 21st century audiences—looks at social action, religion, law, bureaucracy, charisma, the city, and the political community.

Meant as a broad introduction for an educated general public, in its own way Economy and Society is the most demanding textbook yet written by a sociologist. The precision of its definitions, the complexity of its typologies, and the wealth of its historical content make the work an important challenge to our sociological thought: for the advanced undergraduate who gropes for her sense of society, for the graduate student who must develop his own analytical skills, and for the scholar who must match wits with Weber.”

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5 .) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber

Lists It Appears On:

• We Speak For Earth
• ISA
• List Muse
• The Society Pages

Max Weber’s best-known and most controversial work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, first published in 1904, remains to this day a powerful and fascinating read. Weber’s highly accessible style is just one of many reasons for his continuing popularity. The book contends that the Protestant ethic made possible and encouraged the development of capitalism in the West. Widely considered as the most informed work ever written on the social effects of advanced capitalism, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism holds its own as one of the most significant books of the twentieth century. The book is one of those rare works of scholarship which no informed citizen can afford to ignore.

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4 .) The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell

Lists It Appears On:

• Book Depository
• Book Depository
• Social Science Careers
• Goodreads 2

The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate. This widely acclaimed bestseller, in which Malcolm Gladwell explores and brilliantly illuminates the tipping point phenomenon, is already changing the way people throughout the world think about selling products and disseminating ideas.

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3 .) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste by Pierre Bourdieu

Lists It Appears On:

• Five Books
• List Muse
• Social Science Careers
• Goodreads 2
• ISA

“No judgement of taste is innocent. In a word, we are all snobs. Pierre Bourdieu brilliantly illuminates this situation of the middle class in the modern world. France’s leading sociologist focusses here on the French bourgeoisie, its tastes and preferences. Distinction is at once a vast ethnography of contemporary France and a dissection of the bourgeois mind.

In the course of everyday life people constantly choose between what they find aesthetically pleasing and what they consider tacky, merely trendy, or ugly. Bourdieu bases his study on surveys that took into account the multitude of social factors that play a part in a Frenchperson’s choice of clothing, furniture, leisure activities, dinner menus for guests, and many other matters of taste. What emerges from his analysis is that social snobbery is everywhere in the bourgeois world. The different aesthetic choices people make are all distinctions-that is, choices made in opposition to those made by other classes. Taste is not pure. Bourdieu finds a world of social meaning in the decision to order bouillabaisse, in our contemporary cult of thinness, in the “”California sports”” such as jogging and cross-country skiing. The social world, he argues, functions simultaneously as a system of power relations and as a symbolic system in which minute distinctions of taste become the basis for social judgement.”

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2 .) Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt

Lists It Appears On:

• We Speak For Earth
• Letter Pile
• Book Depository
• Real Sociology
• Goodreads 2

“Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? What kind of impact did Roe v. Wade have on violent crime?

These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He is a much heralded scholar who studies the stuff and riddles of everyday life-;from cheating and crime to sports and child rearing-;and whose conclusions regularly turn the conventional wisdom on its head. He usually begins with a mountain of data and a simple, unasked question. Some of these questions concern life-and-death issues; others have an admittedly freakish quality. Thus the new field of study contained in this book: freakonomics.

Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, Levitt and co-author Stephen J. Dubner show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives-;how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. In Freakonomics, they set out to explore the hidden side of … well, everything. The inner workings of a crack gang. The truth about real-estate agents. The myths of campaign finance. The telltale marks of a cheating schoolteacher. The secrets of the Ku Klux Klan.”

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1 .) The Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills

Lists It Appears On:

• We Speak For Earth
• ISA
• List Muse
• Social Science Careers
• Goodreads
• Goodreads 2

C. Wright Mills is best remembered for his highly acclaimed work The Sociological Imagination, in which he set forth his views on how social science should be pursued. Hailed upon publication as a cogent and hard-hitting critique, The Sociological Imagination took issue with the ascendant schools of sociology in the United States, calling for a humanist sociology connecting the social, personal, and historical dimensions of our lives. The sociological imagination Mills calls for is a sociological vision, a way of looking at the world that can see links between the apparently private problems of the individual and important social issues.

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The Additional Best Books About Sociology

16 Best Sociology Book Sources/Lists