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Sociology

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  • The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry
    • 5/5 Stars

    This essay argues that Americans have become estranged from the land, suffered a loss of community, devalued labour and become enslaved to the pursuit of profit. Berry, a farmer as well as a well-known contemporary essayist, has an accessible though…

  • Marriage: The Dream That Refuses to Die by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
    • 5/5 Stars

    Nearly everywhere and at all times, marriage has enjoyed a privileged status as the primary social unit-the essential bond that created alliances between families and a bridge between the sexes. In joining a man and woman, marriage attempted to…

  • The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber, translated by Talcott Parsons
    • 4.5/5 Stars

    This well-known text argues that the Protestant ethic peculiarly enabled and encouraged the development of Western capitalism.

  • Crowd Culture: An Examination of the American Way of Life by Bernard Iddings Bell
    • 0/5 Stars

    It is truly unfortunate that, until now, the work of Canon Bernard Iddings Bell has been out of print for some time. For Bell's cultural criticism was an important impetus to the formation of the postwar traditionalist conservative synthesis, drawing…

  • The "American Way": Family and Community in the Shaping of the American Identity by Allan C. Carlson
    • 0/5 Stars

    The United States of America is arguably more family-centered than any other Western nation. If polling data can be trusted, the vast majority of Americans-a higher percentage than in any other nation-would rather build society around the family and the…

  • The Wreck of Western Culture: Humanism Revisited by John Carroll
    • 0/5 Stars

    Humanism built Western civilization as we know it today. Its achievements include the liberation of the individual, democracy, universal rights, and widespread prosperity and comfort. Its ambassadors are the heroes of modern culture-Erasmus, Holbein, Shakespeare, Velázquez, Descartes, Kant, Freud. Those…

  • The Self: Beyond the Postmodern Crisis by Susan M. Felch and Paul C. Vitz
    • 0/5 Stars

    The peculiar dilemma of the self in our era has been noted by a wide range of writers, even as they have emphasized different aspects of that dilemma, such as the self's alienation, disorientation, inflation, or fragmentation. In The Self…

  • From the Gulag to the Killing Fields: Personal Accounts of Political Violence and Repression in Communist States by Paul Hollander
    • 0/5 Stars

    As a global phenomenon, the scale and character of communism is only now coming into focus. The opening of formerly inaccessible archives and landmark books such as The Black Book of Communism have helped to establish empirically the extent and…

  • Aliens in America: The Strange Truth about Our Souls by Peter Augustine Lawler
    • 0/5 Stars

    Beginning with a consideration of David Brooks's popular and influential characterization of modern Americans as "bourgeois bohemians," Lawler paints a picture that is not altogether hopeful. If Brooks and other contemporary social commentators are correct, our elites care about little…

  • Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam
    • 0/5 Stars
  • The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud by Philip Rieff
    • 0/5 Stars

    Since its publication in 1966, The Triumph of the Therapeutic has been hailed as a work of genuine brilliance, one of those books whose insights uncannily anticipate cultural developments and whose richness of argumentation reorients entire fields of inquiry. This…

  • Liberalism and Its Critics by Michael Sandel
    • 0/5 Stars

    Much contemporary political philosophy has been a debate between utilitarianism on the one hand and Kantian, or rights-based ethic has recently faced a growing challenge from a different direction, from a view that argues for a deeper understanding of citizenship…

  • Robert Nisbet: Communitarian Traditionalist by Brad Lowell Stone
    • 0/5 Stars

    This is the only book-length intellectual treatment of sociologist Robert Nisbet (1913-1996), and it is written by one of the country's leading authorities on his life and work, Brad Lowell Stone. In this work, the debut volume of the new…