the sociological imagination

Is there a relation between the fragmentation of the good and the fragmentary character of the social sciences (and academia in general)? I think Macintyre put this in a better way. Do economists legitimize (wittingly or unwittingly) the dominant structure of power?

Economists (and other social scientists) with their piecemeal analysis (anal-ysis), their fetish for greater and greater levels of abstraction, their lack of commitment to anything but promotion and consultancy money, their desire to be "influential" in policy circles, and their petty and meaningless squabbles amongst themselves ...all of that is grist to the mill of the capitalist system. In addition, methodological individualism as a foundation suits a particular understanding of liberalism, as does the emphasis on a type of freedom (negative liberty). 

No-one can (or is allowed to) see the forest, 'the big picture' or make evaluative statements (part of that stems from the over-inflated importance given to science and engineers, to the idea that technology is always the solution).  

Remember, mainstream economics puts to one side questions of ethics and it ignores, for the most part, politics and culture (and has only recently taken institutions seriously). In addition, it could be argued that psychology-or more precisely , a realist psychology- was also eliminated from the discipline: keeping things down to the simplest of motivations, self-interest: material or welfare/happiness gains at the expense of other considerations certainly allows for "tractability" and "elegance" in formal modeling but is not necessarily 'truer' for all that. Precision and truth not necessarily being the same thing.

Anyway, some quotes to whet your appetite:

“The new practicality is an academic response to a greatly increased demand for administrative technicians.. and for new justifications of corporate business as a system of power.

Their [the academics] participation is, in part, a response to the new job opportunities that are part of the general increase in the scale and the bureaucratic character of business and government, and of the newer institutional relations between corporations and government…

These developments mean an increased demand for experts and accordingly he opening of careers outside as well as within the universities…; the centers of higher learning tend to increasingly produce seemingly a-political technicians.

For those who remain academics, a new sort of career ..has become available; it may be called the career of ‘the new entrepreneur’. This ambitious type of consultant is able to further his career in the university…

The academic profession in America, I think we must recognize, has often failed to make ambitious men contented with merely academic careers…

Both in and out of the university, men at the center of learning become experts inside administrative machines.  This undoubtedly narrows their attention and the scope of such political [and moral ..my addition] thinking as they might do.

The American university system seldom if ever provides political education; it seldom teaches how to gauge what is going on in the general struggle for power in modern society.

It would be naïve ..to suggest anyone was selling out for surely that harsh phrase may properly be used only when there is something to be sold.”

Good stuff, eh? That was from 1959. Remarkably prescient.