Every so often, a book comes along that comments on the state of sociology. Many such books accuse the discipline of being timid and engaging in the type of incrementalism that makes disciplines obsolete in public policy discussions. Michelle Jackson’s Manifesto for a Dream falls squarely into this camp, but she does so with a meticulous detail, clarity, and vision that other authors fail to achieve. She calls on sociologists to use their talents to help carve a better nation by using our collective knowledge and skills to encourage policymakers to grab inequality by the roots, which, she claims, is the only way to overturn the deep-seated inequality that shapes almost every aspect of American life.

Like C. Wright Mils in the classic The Sociological Imagination, Jackson criticizes sociologists for relying too much on tiny accumulations of incremental knowledge rather than pushing big-picture policy ideas. She argues that in pursuit of these tiny accumulations, much sociological analysis purports to focus on institutions but is actually analysis of individuals in which researchers infer institutional barriers from the differential outcomes of individuals without any real analysis of the institutions themselves. The book shines most when she lays out in specific detail how sociologis