Dictionary of Big Ideas in Social Sciences: One Hundred and Fifty Concepts That Explain the Human World

The Dictionary of Big Ideas in Social Sciences gathers one hundred and fifty of the most consequential concepts ever produced by the study of human societies and explains each one in plain language, in under five hundred words, without sacrificing accuracy. Drawn from economics, sociology, political science, psychology, anthropology, geography and demography, language and communication, and the cross-disciplinary territory between them, the entries range from the invisible hand to the veil of ignorance, from anomie to network effects, and from the zone of proximal development to ideas such as phrenology and eugenics that were once mainstream science and are included here as historical artifacts with their failures fully described. Substantial attention is given to concepts formulated outside the European tradition: asabiyyah, the Arthashastra, the mandate of heaven, dharma, ubuntu, guanxi, ijtihad, the waqf, and others are treated as social theory rather than as ethnographic curiosities. Each entry names the originator and date, states the idea in a single sentence, explains what it accounts for in the world, delivers its counterintuitive turn, and closes with an honest account of where the idea stands today, whether foundational, contested, revised, or abandoned. A system of colour coding by discipline, extensive cross-references, and thematic and biographical indexes make the book navigable in several directions at once. It is written for curious general readers, for students meeting these ideas for the first time, for journalists and professionals who need a fast and trustworthy orientation, and for academics who want a reliable primer on a field that is not their own.