On Contemporary Sociology: A Critical Response to Tomasz Zarycki

Abstract

In his 2025 article, Tomasz Zarycki argues that contemporary sociology – particularly critical sociology – is undergoing a process of losing its autonomy. It is threatened by interdisciplinarity and the hegemony of other disciplines, such as psychology, economics, and political science. The crisis of the discipline is further deepened by disciplinary fragmentation, manifested in the proliferation of various “studies of” (technology, migration, culture, etc.), as well as the rise of think tanks that serve political and economic interests. In Zarycki’s view, these institutions replace scientific knowledge with expert opinion. In my polemic, I argue that while part of this diagnosis is valid, the proposed remedy for rescuing sociology from crisis as well as the causes indicated by Zarycki are both misguided. Increased contextualisation, historicisation, and the abandonment of formal science and statistical modelling will only deepen the discipline’s dependence on political actors and other fields of knowledge, rather than enabling it to produce knowledge autonomously. The vocation and mission of sociology is to critique power in the interest of society, but this goal cannot be fulfilled without a rigorous approach to empirical research and the conscious development of causal theoretical models.