ABSTRACT
Caille and Vandenberghe call for a “neoclassical sociology”. By this, they mean a sociology with more room for theory, tighter connections to moral philosophy and the various “studies” fields, and a higher level of public engagement amongst other things. In sum, some of the things that Caille and Vandenberghe admire most about classical sociology were less the result of any systematic intellectual program than of a contingent historical constellation. A similar dynamic can be observed between and within the various social science disciplines: money and minds are drifting in the direction of the “harder” and more “quantitative” social science disciplines and subfields. In sociology itself, the big money is in big data not in big theory. It is crucial that social theorists connect with the new generation of organic intellectuals that has refused the cursus honorum of academic life and find ways to speak with the various counter-publics that have taken root in the interstices of the Internet.
