True, very true. I would only add that most of us willingly or unwillingly participate in this game - by endless citations, names dropping, naming conventions (cf. Mr. So and So theorem), focusing our attention on intellectual celebrities (cf. lbo's discussion about Hitchens, Horowitz, Chomsky et al.) and pondering who said what and what it means.
I'd say that about three fourths of what passes today for "doing social science" is the production and marketing of intellectual commodity that produces no new knowledge (it merely popularizes and often obscures what is already known) but generates a stream of income for its manufacturers.
Wojtek