Abandoning critique reduces sociology to fact-collection that undermines its own insights

Evidence

Sociology’s abandonment of a critical theory of society is resignatory: one no longer dares to conceive of the whole since one must despair of changing it. But if sociology then desired to commit itself to the apprehension of facts and figures in the service of that which exists, then such progress under conditions of unfreedom would increasingly detract from the detailed insights through which sociology thinks it triumphs over theory and condemn them completely to irrelevance. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 598

Categorization

• XREF: Cashes out the Frankfurt School’s argument, seen elsewhere in the book, that instrumental reason defeats itself; also resonates with Pollock’s and Adorno’s diagnoses of organized capitalism.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that empiricism’s triumph over theory destroys empiricism’s own results is a self-undermining structure worth sitting with — it inverts the usual charge that critique neglects facts.