This kind of thing is exactly my jam. I read Becker about a year ago and it set off a landslide that has still not settled. Much appreciate the others, I have made note of them.
Great to hear!! I'm also always on the hunt for books similar to this - a weird mix of psychoanalysis, sociology, deep thought - so happy to hear your recommendations as well!!
Everything (really) by Erving Goffman. A beautiful synthesis is [1] which I might recommend over the original material (sacrilege!) if you were only going to read one thing.
We (as Western Civilization, maybe) have still (imo) not come to terms with the bounty that is William James. I had negligible interest in religion, but if you're into the weird mix of psychoanalysis, sociology, and deep thought, I cannot recommend [2] enough. I read it over the course of a year, annotated the margins like the faithful annotate their holy texts (do they do that?) and many evenings still open a page, read randomly, and ponder.
I had never really considered what an institution really was, or how it came to be, or what was implicit / assumed in interacting with it. This classic prompted much fruitful imagining [3] although it's the most difficult reading of them all.
Given your tastes, you may have slogged through a bunch of philosophy and hated it. The good news (or maybe the bad news) is that this is super fun and easy to read and gives you most of the same nutrients [4] as certain schools, and has obvious contemporary relevance besides.
This scratches a proximate itch [5].
I'm a little sheepish bc all of these (except for maybe [5]) are deep classics and are, in a sense, obvious for that reason. And yet I have a PhD in a related field and never actually _read_ any of them, so maybe they won't be obvious to you either :)
Thank you so much!!!!! I had The Varieties of Religious Experiences on my to-read-list forever but never got to it; I had never even heard of those other authors. Thank you so much!
Another rec: Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism, on how we can't imagine alternatives to capitalism any more.
Byung-Chul Han's Psychopolitics, on how modern neoliberalism turned us into self-exploiters. There's no 'upper class' suppressing the 'lower classes' anymore, we've moved to self-exploit, to push ourselves as our own horrible boss, without a structure to rebel against, with no chance of escape.
