Longlisted for the 2024 Financial Times Book of the Year. How life and the economy became a black box—a collection of systems no one understands, producing outcomes no one likes.
 
Passengers get bumped from flights. Phone menus disconnect. Automated financial trades produce market collapse. Of all the challenges in modern life, some of the most vexing come from our relationships with automation: a large system does us wrong, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

The problem, economist Dan Davies shows, is accountability sinks: systems in which decisions are delegated to a complex rule book or set of standard procedures, making it impossible to identify the source of mistakes when they happen. In our increasingly unhuman world—lives dominated by algorithms, artificial intelligence, and large organizations—these accountability sinks produce more than just aggravation. They make life and economy unknowable—a black box for no reason.

In The Unaccountability Machine, Davies lays bare how markets, institutions, and even governments systematically generate outcomes that no one—not even those involved in making them—seems to want. Since the earliest days of the computer age, theorists have foreseen the dangers of complex systems without personal accountability. In response, British business scholar Stafford Beer developed an accountability-first approach to management called “cybernetics,” which might have taken off had his biggest client (the Chilean government) not fallen to a bloody coup in 1973.

With his signature blend of economic and journalistic rigor, Davies examines what’s gone wrong since Beer, including what might have been had the world embraced cybernetics when it had the chance. The Unaccountability Machine is a revelatory and resonant account of how modern life became predisposed to dysfunction.

The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How the World Lost Its Mind (Sample)

A sobering excavation of how deeply nineteenth-century American banks were entwined with the institution of slavery.

It’s now widely understood that the fullest expression of nineteenth-century American capitalism was found in the structures of chattel slavery. It’s also understood that almost every other institution and aspect of life then was at least entangled with—and often profited from—slavery’s perpetuation. Yet as Sharon Ann Murphy shows in her powerful and unprecedented book, the centrality of enslaved labor to banking in the antebellum United States is far greater than previously thought.
 
Banking on Slavery sheds light on precisely how the financial relationships between banks and slaveholders worked across the nineteenth-century South. Murphy argues that the rapid spread of slavery in the South during the 1820s and ’30s depended significantly upon southern banks’ willingness to financialize enslaved lives, with the use of enslaved individuals as loan collateral proving central to these financial relationships. She makes clear how southern banks were ready—and, in some cases, even eager—to alter time-honored banking practices to meet the needs of slaveholders.  In the end, many of these banks sacrificed themselves in their efforts to stabilize the slave economy. Murphy also details how banks and slaveholders transformed enslaved lives from physical bodies into abstract capital assets. Her book provides an essential examination of how our nation’s financial history is more intimately intertwined with the dehumanizing institution of slavery than scholars have previously thought.

 

Banking on Slavery: Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States (Sample)

A political history of the rise and fall of American debt relief.

Americans have a long history with debt. They also have a long history of mobilizing for debt relief. Throughout the nineteenth century, indebted citizens demanded government protection from their financial burdens, challenging readings of the Constitution that exalted property rights at the expense of the vulnerable. Their appeals shaped the country’s periodic experiments with state debt relief and federal bankruptcy law, constituting a pre-industrial safety net. Yet, the twentieth century saw the erosion of debtor politics and the eventual retrenchment of bankruptcy protections.

The Political Development of American Debt Relief traces how geographic, sectoral, and racial politics shaped debtor activism over time, enhancing our understanding of state-building, constitutionalism, and social policy.

The Political Development of American Debt Relief (Sample)

A provocative book arguing that the workplace is where we learn to live democratically.

In The Pandemic Workplace, anthropologist Ilana Gershon turns her attention to the US workplace and how it changed—and changed us—during the pandemic. She argues that the unprecedented organizational challenges of the pandemic forced us to radically reexamine our attitudes about work and to think more deeply about how values clash in the workplace. These changes also led us as workers to engage more with the contracts that bind us as we rethought when and how we allow others to tell us what to do.

Based on over two hundred interviews, Gershon’s book reveals how negotiating these tensions during the pandemic made the workplace into a laboratory for democratic living—the key place where Americans are learning how to develop effective political strategies and think about the common good. Exploring the explicit and unspoken ways we are governed (and govern others) at work, this accessible book shows how the workplace teaches us to be democratic citizens.

The Pandemic Workplace: How We Learned to Be Citizens in the Office (Sample)

One of the most brilliantly original of American pragmatists, George Herbert Mead published surprisingly few major papers and not a single book during his lifetime. Yet his influence on American sociology and social psychology since World War II has been exceedingly strong.

This volume is a revised and enlarged edition of the book formerly published under the title The Social Psychology of George Herbert Mead. It contains selections from Mead’s posthumous books: Mind, Self, and Society; Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century; The Philosophy of the Act; and The Philosophy of the Present, together with an incisive, newly revised, introductory essay by Anselm Strauss on the importance of Mead for contemporary social psychology.

“Required reading for the social scientist.”—Milton L. Barron, Nation

George Herbert Mead on Social Psychology (Sample)

This volume presents those writings of Marx that best reveal his contribution to sociology, particularly to the theory of society and social change. The editor, Neil J. Smelser, has divided these selections into three topical sections and has also included works by Friedrich Engels.

The first section, “The Structure of Society,” contains Marx’s writings on the material basis of classes, the basis of the state, and the basis of the family. Among the writings included in this section are Marx’s well-known summary from the Preface of A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy and his equally famous observations on the functional significance of religion in relation to politics.

The second section is titled “The Sweep of Historical Change.” The first selection here contains Marx’s first statement of the main precapitalist forms of production. The second selection focuses on capitalism, its contradictions, and its impending destruction. Two brief final selections treat the nature of communism, particularly its freedom from the kinds of contradictions that have plagued all earlier forms of societies.

The last section, “The Mechanisms of Change,” reproduces several parts of Marx’s analysis of the mechanisms by which contradictions develop in capitalism and generate group conflicts. Included is an analysis of competition and its effects on the various classes, a discussion of economic crises and their effects on workers, and Marx’s presentation of the historical specifics of the class struggle.

In his comprehensive Introduction to the selections, Professor Smelser provides a biography of Marx, indentifies the various intellectual traditions which formed the background for Marx’s writings, and discusses the selections which follow. The editor describes Marx’s conception of society as a social system, the differences between functionalism and Marx’s theories, and the dynamics of economic and political change as analyzed by Marx.

Karl Marx on Society and Social Change With Selections by Friedrich Engels (Sample)

Gabriel Tarde ranks as one of the most outstanding sociologists of nineteenth-century France, though not as well known by English readers as his peers Comte and Durkheim. This book makes available Tarde’s most important work and demonstrates his continuing relevance to a new generation of students and thinkers.

Tarde’s landmark research and empirical analysis drew upon collective behavior, mass communications, and civic opinion as elements to be explained within the context of broader social patterns. Unlike the mass society theorists that followed in his wake, Tarde integrated his discussions of societal change at the macrosocietal and individual levels, anticipating later twentieth-century thinkers who fused the studies of mass communications and public opinion research.

Terry N. Clark’s introduction, considered the premier guide to Tarde’s opus, accompanies this important work, reprinted here for the first time in forty years.

Gabriel Tarde On Communication and Social Influence: Selected Papers (Sample)

A Great and Rising Nation illuminates the unexplored early decades of the United States’ imperialist naval aspirations.

Conventional wisdom holds that, until the Spanish-American War of 1898, the United States was a feeble player on the world stage, with an international presence rooted in commerce rather than military might. Michael A. Verney’s A Great and Rising Nation flips this notion on its head, arguing that early US naval expeditions, often characterized as merely scientific, were in fact deeply imperialist. Circling the globe from the Mediterranean to South America and the Arctic, these voyages reflected the diverse imperial aspirations of the new republic, including commercial dominance in the Pacific World, religious empire in the Holy Land, proslavery expansion in South America, and diplomatic prestige in Europe. As Verney makes clear, the United States had global imperial aspirations far earlier than is commonly thought.

A Great and Rising Nation: Naval Exploration and Global Empire in the Early US Republic (Sample)

Historian, journalist, educator, and civil rights advocate W. E. B. Du Bois was perhaps most accomplished as a sociologist of race relations and of the black community in the United States. This volume collects his most important sociological writings from 1898 to 1910. The eighteen selections include five on Du Bois’s conception of sociology and sociological research, especially as a tool in the struggle for racial justice; excerpts from studies of black communities in the South and the North, including The Philadelphia Negro; writings on black culture and social life, with a selection from The Negro American Family; and later works on race relations in the United States and elsewhere after World War II. This section includes a powerful fiftieth-anniversary reassessment of his classic 1901 article in the Atlantic in which he predicted that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.“

The editors provide an annotated bibliography, a lengthy overview of Du Bois’s life and work, and detailed introductions to the selections.

“The most significant contribution of this book is its inclusive look at Du Bois as both academic and activist. . . . Individuals interested in the study of social issues and political sociology would benefit from reading and discussing this book.”—Paul Kriese, Sociology: Reviews of New Books

“Green and Driver, informing this volume with a 48-page essay that summarizes Du Bois’ career and places him in the context of the profession, have intelligently organized his writings. . . . A welcome contribution that should have wide use.”—Elliott Rudwick, Contemporary Sociology


W. E. B. DuBois on Sociology and the Black Community (Sample)

How do we use our mental images of the present to reconstruct our past? Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945) addressed this question for the first time in his work on collective memory, which established him as a major figure in the history of sociology. This volume, the first comprehensive English-language translation of Halbwach’s writings on the social construction of memory, fills a major gap in the literature on the sociology of knowledge.

Halbwachs’ primary thesis is that human memory can only function within a collective context. Collective memory, Halbwachs asserts, is always selective; various groups of people have different collective memories, which in turn give rise to different modes of behavior. Halbwachs shows, for example, how pilgrims to the Holy Land over the centuries evoked very different images of the events of Jesus’ life; how wealthy old families in France have a memory of the past that diverges sharply from that of the nouveaux riches; and how working class construction of reality differ from those of their middle-class counterparts.

With a detailed introduction by Lewis A. Coser, this translation will be an indispensable source for new research in historical sociology and cultural memory.

Lewis A. Coser is Distinguished Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the State University of New York and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at Boston College.

On Collective Memory (Sample)

First published in 1925, The City is a trailblazing text in urban history, urban sociology, and urban studies. Its innovative combination of ethnographic observation and social science theory epitomized the Chicago school of sociology. Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and their collaborators were among the first to document the interplay between urban individuals and larger social structures and institutions, seeking patterns within the city’s riot of people, events, and influences. As sociologist Robert J. Sampson notes in his new foreword, though much has changed since The City was first published, we can still benefit from its charge to explain where and why individuals and social groups live as they do.

The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How the World Lost Its Mind (Sample)

UChicagoPress

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