Daniel Bell has died at the age of ninety one. The New York Times has an obituary, and I’m sure there will be more to follow elsewhere. I heard a story once about Bell being asked what he specialized in. “Generalizations”, he replied. But not the sterile, merely verbal generalizations of something like structural-functionalism, the dominant “grand social theory” of his day. Bell was prepared to sick his neck out. This meant he could get things wrong. I’ll leave his political writings for others to assess. His cultural criticism has not aged well: his sniffy disdain for “aggressive female sexuality”, for instance, or his view that the “new sound” of the Beatles made it “impossible to hear oneself think, and that may indeed have been its intention” are unlikely to play so well today. But we should be so lucky to coin so many phrases that become part of the language — “The End of Ideology”, “The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism”, “The Coming of Post-Industrial Society“. The latter book, in particular, is one of the most impressive pieces of economic sociology written in the twentieth century. It asks a big question about the future, it works out an answer, and gets it mostly right. At the beginning of his academic career Bell was on the periphery of the self-consciously scientific sociology department at Columbia that had Robert Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld at its core. (A little like C. Wright Mills, interestingly enough.) I believe they thought of him more as a journalist and political type, at least initially, given his background at Fortune magazine. Yet a book like The Coming of Post-Industrial Society has more truly scientific spirit about it than Social Theory and Social Structure.
{ 15 comments }
LFC 01.26.11 at 4:56 pm
The Daniel Bell book I have on my shelf is his collection of essays and articles The Winding Passage. He is always a pleasure to read, even when one doesn’t agree with him. His review of Michael Harrington’s The Twilight of Capitalism, reprinted in The Winding Passage, led to, IIRC, a rather nasty exchange. In addition to the books you mention in the post, Bell was also very involved (IIRC as chair or co-chair) of something called The Commission on the Year 2000 (or something like that), which issued a big report in the 70s (or late 60s?). Btw, his son David Bell is an historian; writes about 19th cent. France and other things. I’m not a sociologist, so don’t have much more to say, but thanks for the post.
LFC 01.26.11 at 6:03 pm
P.S. One more thing: Although Bell was friends with some neoconservatives, he never became a neocon himself.
Sev 01.26.11 at 6:13 pm
The only one I read was “The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism,” which I thought was a pretty good thesis, basically Marxian in its thesis-antithesis view of economic motives producing cultural attitudes, only marred a bit by a certain disdainful ivory tower sniffiness toward contemporary culture. His self-description in the obit as “a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics and a conservative in culture†seems accurate. I suspect many hours were spent in the City College cafeteria trading and refining these tripartite re-workings of Eliot.
Sev 01.26.11 at 6:13 pm
The only one I read was “The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism,” which I thought was a pretty good thesis, basically Marxian in its thesis-antithesis view of economic motives producing cultural attitudes, only marred a bit by a certain disdainful ivory tower sniffiness toward contemporary culture. His self-description in the obit as “a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics and a conservative in culture†seems accurate. I suspect many hours were spent in the City College cafeteria trading and refining these tripartite re-workings of Eliot.
Phil 01.26.11 at 7:24 pm
His self-description in the obit as “a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics and a conservative in cultureâ€
Hang on, that’s me…
ejh 01.26.11 at 9:13 pm
No, me. Well, except the liberal-in-politics thing.
The Creator 01.27.11 at 7:56 am
It does seem that however urbanely and cleverly he wrote, virtually all of Bell’s big ideas were completely wrong. You cite “the end of ideology” and “post-industrial society”; both concepts were complete twaddle when Bell came up with them and are complete twaddle now, although he was treated with great respect at the time and is being treated with great respect here. More to the point, Bell never, to my knowledge, admitted, or even seems to have realised, how wrong he was.
Is it really prudent to celebrate glib, self-centred nincompoops who pretend to be great thinkers but in fact, demonstrably are not? Especially when — feel free to disagree, for this is just an opinion — their blundering nonsense happened to consistently sustain the propaganda of the national ruling class?
LFC 01.27.11 at 12:00 pm
@The Creator —
The concept of ‘post-industrial society’ is not “complete twaddle” if it’s taken to mean, among other things, that services (rather than manufacturing) would come to dominate in certain so-called ‘advanced’ economies. For better or worse (I happen to think it’s probably for worse, but that’s neither here nor there), that’s what has happened.
You would expect a “glib, self-centred” person to be constantly blowing his own horn. My impression, not having known him personally but based on what I know at second hand, was that Bell did not do this.
Norwegian Guy 01.27.11 at 3:49 pm
“Conservative in culture” is one of those fairly meaningless phrase that sometimes gets thrown around. It doesn’t really say much about cultural preferences. The stereotypical (American) conservative likes country music. Don’t know if Bell did.
zamfir 01.27.11 at 6:14 pm
LFC, I often wonder how true that manufacturing to services story really is. Part of the story is a movement of labour-intensive manufacturing to other countries, while services didn’t. In that respect, the developed world is as post-manufacturing as medieval Paris was post-agrarian.
Another part is that jobs shifted from manufacturing to specialized service firms. From qccountants to cleaners, manufacturing firms used to employ lots of people agony are now in services, even though they do the exact same work.
After those effects, how much post-manufacturing is really left?
Stark 01.27.11 at 6:34 pm
I had no idea David Bell was Daniel Bell’s son, he’s probably one of the five most influential historians of the French Revolution still writing today.
JJ 01.27.11 at 9:39 pm
This guy credits Bell with providing the theory behind the culture wars:
http://us-intellectual-history.blogspot.com/2011/01/rip-daniel-bell-culture-wars.html
LFC 01.28.11 at 2:23 pm
Zamfir @10:
The movement of labor-intensive manufacturing to poorer (lower-cost) parts of the world would support not contradict the point about the smaller share of manufacturing in the ‘developed’ world, no? Labor-intensive manufacturing didn’t vanish altogether, a lot if it just went elsewhere. There’s still some left in the richest countries but not as much as there used to be.
andthenyoufall 01.28.11 at 10:07 pm
@9 – Meaningless meaning what? I think that “culturally conservative” might be somewhat vague, in the sense that it doesn’t specify what spheres of culture it includes (art? music? literature? drama? movies? sex? sexuality? religion? drugs? architecture?), and it doesn’t specify the reference point of the conservativism (presumably I could be a cultural conservative today and love Kandinsky and Satie, which wouldn’t be the case if I were a vintage-1900 cultural conservative), but I can’t imagine having trouble understanding the basic position a self-declared cultural conservative was trying to stake out. Country music, gun shows, and other artifacts of “red state” culture have nothing to do with it.
stostosto 01.29.11 at 11:44 am
The Creator @7, Zamfir @7,
Without having read Bell’s seminal book, I have always taken post-industrial society to denote a society in which only a minority of the work force is occupied in industry. This is not a society that doesn’t produce industrial goods, much as an industrial society isn’t defined by not producing agricultural products. In fact, industrial and agricultural production have continued growing steadily as measured by value despite the declared ending of both agricultural and industrial society .
It’s just that ever fewer people are directly involved in producing them. A story which doesn’t depend on a shifting division of work between developed and developing countries. It primarily depends on automatisation, technical shifts, productivity enhancing and labour saving ways of organising production. I.e. post-industrial society is endogenous to modern society and does indeed mark a qualitative transformation, a move to a new phase in social development. It’s not just “medieval Paris” all over again.
It’s a different type of society with different organising principles, socially, economically, politically.
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