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IT SEEMS THERE’S NO WAY out of sociology; nevertheless sociology cannot provide us with internal reasons for its ever-rising prestige. Surely we want to be able to say that the sociology of culture is valuable because it’s true or insightful. However, a culture that blithely accepts a sociological …

Arguing that an epiphenomenon of an unjust society exists to rationalize that society’s injustice: it’s a silencing maneuver that cultural sociologists have perfected, making them unbeatable on their own terms. The ordinary person, genuflecting before his unfreedom, cries “uncle”—which the sociolog…

The danger is that the critical insights of what was called “critical sociology” have been repurposed as the status-quo thinking of “concerned liberalism”—the very thing that it set out to subvert. Thinking of everything as a scripted game show hasn’t led to change. Instead, sociological thinking h…

Given the gap that exists between ideal and nonideal theory and the conditions under which each is elaborated, it would seem that the more demanding the ideal, the more distant that ideal is from societies as we know them, the heavier the burden to articulate a theory of the transition from where w…

Is my dialectical program just neoliberalism by stealth? Does this darkly Hegelian road come to a dead-end? It is widely believed that basic income presents a clear and present danger of cooptation. This is true; it is entirely possible to imagine it being coopted. The same is true for a jobs guara…