Moral Change and the Ambiguity of Religions: Christianity between Racism and the Struggle against It. Uppsala: Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. 2023.

Die Macht des Heiligen. Eine Alternative zur Geschichte von der Entzauberung. Berlin: Suhrkamp. 2017. Translated to English as The Power of the Sacred: An Alternative to the Narrative of Disenchantment. New York: Oxford University Press. 2021.

Slavery and Torture in a Global Perspective: Human Rights and the Western Tradition. Leiden: Brill. 2014. 

War in Social Thought: Hobbes to the Present. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2013 (with Wolfgang Knöbl).

The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights. Washington: Georgetown University Press. 2013.

Glaube als Option. Zukunftsmöglichkeiten des Christentums. Freiburg: Herder. 2012. Translated to English as Faith as an Option: Possible Futures for Christianity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2014.

The Axial Age and Its Consequences. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2012 (edited with Robert N. Bellah).

Interdisciplinarity as a Process of Learning: Experiences with an Action Theoretic Program of Research. Gottingen: Wallstein. 2005 (with Hans G. Kippenberg).

Do Human Beings Need Religion? Freiburg: Herder. 2004.

Social Theory: Twenty Introductory Lectures. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. 2004.

The Dialogical Turn: New Roles for Sociology in the Postdisciplinary Age. Rowman and Littlefield. 2004 (with Charles Camic).

War and Modernity: Studies in the History of Violence in the 20th Century. Polity Press. 2003.

The Genesis of Values. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2001.

Philosophy of Democracy. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. 2000.

G.H. Mead: A Contemporary Reexamination of his Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1997.

The Creativity of Action. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1997.