The Books of My Life: Essential Concepts in Sociology

Anthony Giddens's and Philip Sutton's Essential Concepts in Sociology (Cambridge, England: Polity, second edition 2017) is a kind of Keywords--Raymond Williams's famous book on the history of keywords in the humanities and social sciences--for sociology. At the heart of Essentials are 67 "essential concepts" in the academic discipline of Sociology selected by the authors. For each of these 67 key or essential concepts in sociology, the book defines the concept, explores the origins of the concept, delineates the meaning and interpretation of the concept, notes critical points related to the concept, and offers a discussion of the continuing relevance of the concept to academic Sociology (and by extension Political Science, History, Social Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, and Social Psychology). 

Each of the 67 concepts Giddens and Sutton explore, concepts like society, culture, sick role, division of labour, sexuality, and stigma, for instance, are, in turn, organised into ten themes, as Giddens and Sutton call them-Thinking Sociologically; Doing Sociology; Environment and Urbanism; Structures of Society; Unequal Life Chances; Relationships and the Life Course; Interaction and Communication; Health Illness and the Body; Crime and Social Control; and Political Sociology. Organising the concepts into themes allows the authors of the book to touch on and succinctly introduce readers to most of the central sub-disciplines of the discipline of Sociology in the twenty-first century.

Though one might quibble with the concepts Giddens and Sutton include or exclude--I found it unfortunate that the book did not include a discussion of civil religion, public religion, or civic religion given its centrality to national identity--Essential Concepts in Sociology does an excellent job of exploring, in a little over 200 pages, most of the central theoretical concepts of the discipline today. In addition to being brief--each essay is three to four pages--and to the point, each essay is written for a general audience making it an excellent guide to the state of the current Sociological art, and a book that can be usefully assigned in general education introductory classes in Sociology. At its heart, after all, Essentials tells us things all of us need to know and understand about the human condition, something everyone, including every college student, needs, in my opinion, to think about at least once in their life.