Right out of the authoritarian playbook

but even in Weber, the agnosticism about Platonic virtue still gives morals (or values or whatever) a causal weight that can't be reduced to economism. And that's true for many other theorists! Anyway, I'm reading Adam Seligman lately and a lot of it is really great but this is driving me nuts.

like if the good isn't *really* good then everything is just some iteration of individual preference. And I just don't buy it. I see how there are elements of "subjective expected utility" or what have you in Weber on down...

There is a certain kind of communitarian mapping of social theory (in sociology and elsewhere) which starts in different places (what is authority, how does difference work, cultural epistemology, etc, etc) but usually winds up with something like a lament for moral realism...

Inheritance explains more than 60% of wealth inequality nationwide Any serious attempt to address inequality should start there. www.nytimes.com/2024/04/13/o...

Opinion | You Don’t Have to Take Every Tax Deduction, and You Shouldn’t

Many exemptions are very hard, perhaps impossibly hard, to defend on either practical or moral grounds.

Is this an opening for sociology? My sense is we’re generally skeptical of universals as well, and for pretty good reasons. But I wonder if we could be a bit more cautiously optimistic, if nothing else to disprove the global ambition of homo economics.

With some exceptions, it seems cultural anthropologist are now skeptical of human universals and while most psychologists still have global ambitions, they’re not as focused on the social/interactive (except social psych obviously but they usually don’t focus on the meso, macro and diachronic).

Do sociologists care about human universals? I think we’re a bit vague about this, perhaps intentionally. Does field theory or front stage/backstage work in any society in any time in human history?

New preprint w/ @emroberto.bsky.socialosf.io/preprints/so...

My essay, '22, & Arendt so on point. French salon society, she says, "did not doubt that homosexuals were ‘criminals’ or that Jews were ‘traitors’; they only revised their attitude toward crime and treason." Trump & co. have long benefited from similarly revisionist attitudes toward crime and treason

Truth queens and gallows humor - Bonnie Honig, 2023

How can truth be used to fight disinformation without reproducing the “reveal”—oriented or secret-constituting epistemology of the closet, as Eve Sedgwick descr...