Has the cultural studies critique of classical sociology run its course?

There exists a strand within Cultural Studies which proclaims the irrelevance of the dead white men of classical sociology. Turning on its head Parsons’ assertion that Weber had incorporated all that was worthwhile from Marx, they write as if neo-Marxism had incorporated all that was worthwhile in classical sociology, post- structuralism all that was worthwhile in neo-Marxism, and together they had brought sociology to the point where it is a science ready to forget its founders, or at least to cease to teach them except to specialists in the history of sociology. The two decades after 1989 have seen, therefore the flowering of an almost anti-theoretical, experiental cultural studies challenged only by an aggressively a-political “middle way” which sought to synthesize previously competing sociologies. The writer will suggest that sociologists studying the resistance of oppressed minorities have been forced to re- discover the classical sociologists from whom they ultimately derive their ability to ask effective critical questions about and against the consensual syntheses which merely describe the operations of society and culture; and that the credit crunch may make the relevance of these questions more apparent