Some social science theories have remarkable staying power; others turn out to have a more limited shelf life. Sometimes a once-promising idea just doesn’t seem to lead anywhere—Talcott Parsons’s structural-functionalist approach to sociology might be one example—and eventually most scholars abandon it and move on. Or a novel theoretical argument can sound compelling when it first appears, but subsequent research reveals its logical or empirical limitations. In other cases, the real world delivers a harsh verdict on a bold claim—remember the “end of history” thesis?—although some discredited theories can survive, zombie-like, because powerful interests find it useful to keep them...
Monitoring Antisemitism Intel
