Economics and the Culture War
ROBERT SKIDELSKY
Some economists may prefer to concentrate on the current economic situation while standing apart from cultural questions, or to say that the current kerfuffle over “cancel culture” will recede when the economy improves. But this is to abdicate responsibility, and to choose the easy road under cover of their discipline’s neutrality.
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/should-economics-remain-detached-from-culture-by-robert-skidelsky-2020-07

Ivan Szelenyi is professor emeritus and former dean of social sciences at New York University Abu Dhabi.
Alvin Gouldner published The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology just 45 years ago, in 1970. Like most great theories it was the Owl of Minerva, which came with the dusk. Gouldner predicted the fall of Parsonion (quasi)-positivist functionalism and the raise of a more reflexive sociology.
https://contexts.org/blog/the-triple-crisis-of-sociology/

The Nine Lives of Modernization Theory By Arjun Appadurai
THE LIGHT THAT FAILED: Why the West Is Losing the Fight for Democracy, by two well-known and highly regarded political analysts, has garnered glowing reviews from a range of intellectual luminaries, and has won at least one major prize. I thus began to read it with high hopes of gaining some new and important insights into the turn to the populist right in Eastern Europe, and the implications of this turn for the wider world. I was deeply disappointed.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-nine-lives-of-modernization-theory/

The Triumph of Black Lives Matter and Neoliberal Redemption
By Cedric Johnson (University of Illinois at Chicago)
Draped in Ghanaian kente cloth, a fabric popularized by Afrocentric nationalists during the late eighties, a dozen or so Congressional Democrats knelt in a moment of silence before unveiling their Justice in Policing legislation…
https://nonsite.org