Q.Can you think of reasons why we should study the work of thinkers who died long ago? What could be some reasons to not study them?

There are real reasons to study classical thinkers (their concepts still shape analysis today, and give a critical standard for judging new theories) and real reasons for caution (their ideas were shaped by a specific, Western, colonial-era context). …

There are genuine arguments on both sides of this question, and working through them is more valuable than settling on a single answer. In favour of studying thinkers who died long ago: the basic conceptual vocabulary built by Marx, Durkheim and Weber -- class, alienation, social fact, mechanical and organic solidarity, bureaucracy, rational-legal authority, ideal type, value neutrality -- still shapes how sociologists analyse contemporary problems, from economic inequality to social cohesion to how modern institutions organise authority; these concepts did not become obsolete simply because the thinkers who developed them are no longer alive. Studying their original, fuller arguments, rather than only later simplified summaries, also gives us a critical standard against which to judge newer theories -- understanding exactly how and why an idea was built makes it easier to see what a new theory genuinely adds, or where it might be repeating an old error. And because these thinkers were writing precisely as the modern, urban, industrial world was first coming into being, their work gives us a valuable comparative vantage point on how far contemporary society still resembles, or has moved away from, the industrial society they were originally describing. Against studying them uncritically: these thinkers wrote from a specifically nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Western European standpoint, during an era of colonial expansion, and their theories were built to explain the specific societies and historical transitions they had direct experience of. Applying their frameworks unchanged to a very different context -- a twenty-first-century, post-colonial, globalised and digitally connected society such as contemporary India -- risks anachronism, or importing assumptions about class, religion, the individual or 'primitive …