Daniel Bell, the American sociologist who has died aged 91, coined the terms “post-industrial” and “the information society” and predicted the end of communism, the rise of the internet and other trends long before they occurred.
Daniel Bell Photo: AP
Two of Bell’s books — The End of Ideology (1960) and Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1978) — were cited by the Times Literary Supplement as among the 100 most influential works written since the Second World War.
In the first, Bell argued that the dire effects of Russian communism and German fascism had rendered obsolete all extreme political dogmas, and predicted an era when social and political programmes would be based on pragmatism, rather than on slogans and personality cults.
“A utopia has to specify where one wants to go, how to get there, the costs of the enterprise, and some realisation of and justification for the determination of who is to pay,” he wrote. Though such ideas may be commonplace now, at the height of the Cold War and during the first rumblings of campus radicalism they were mocked by some as unrealistic.
In The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society (1973), Bell noted a decline in the blue-collar “proletariat”, the supposed shock troops for the Marxist revolution. He foresaw “the pre-eminence of the professional and technical class” and predicted that the computer would come to define the late 20th century as much as the motor car had its middle years.
As early as 1967, he evoked a future of “tens of thousands of terminals in homes and offices 'hooked’ into giant central computers providing library and information services, retail ordering and billing services, and the like”.
From the perspective of a world struggling to emerge from the global financial meltdown, perhaps Bell’s most important work was Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), in which he noted that the increasingly structured economy in which people work exists in parallel with a private sphere based on the “untrammelled self”.
“A corporation finds its people being straight by day and swingers by night,” he wrote. Western capitalism had come to rely on mass consumerism, acquisitiveness and easy credit, undermining the old Protestant virtues of thrift, discipline and restraint, and placing the future of the system itself in jeopardy.
Unlike many American public intellectuals of his ilk, Bell resisted political categorisation. He began as a Leftist in the 1930s but, in the 1960s, helped his friend Irving Kristol found The Public Interest, a journal destined in the 1980s to become a powerhouse for neoconservatism. But Bell and the journal had parted company long before.
Describing himself as a “socialist in economics, a liberal in politics and a conservative in culture”, Bell supported a modest welfare state while vehemently opposing all manifestations of modernism, which he considered a “great profanation” of art and culture – built on “the shambles and appetite of self-interest”.
He was born Daniel Bolotsky in New York on May 10 1919 to impoverished Jewish immigrants from Poland. His father, a garment worker, died when he was 10 months old, and Daniel spent part of his childhood in an orphanage while his widowed mother worked in a factory.
By the age of 13 Daniel had become an ardent socialist: “When I had my bar mitzvah,” he recalled, “I said to the Rabbi, 'I’ve found the truth. I don’t believe in God. I’m joining the Young People’s Socialist League.’ So he looked at me and said, 'Kid, you don’t believe in God. Tell me, do you think God cares?’”
After Stuyvesant High School, he entered City College, New York, which, in the late 1930s, was known for its young, mostly Jewish, students who spent hours debating Marxism in Alcove No 1 of the college canteen. Bell’s contemporaries included such future luminaries as the writers Irving Kristol and Irving Howe, the sociologists Nathan Glazer and Seymour Martin Lipset, and the art critic Harold Rosenberg.
After taking a degree in Sociology, Bell began writing for The New Leader magazine. Exempted from military service for medical reasons during the Second World War, he served as the magazine’s managing editor from 1941 to 1944, switching to a similar position at Common Sense magazine in 1945. In the same year he became an instructor at the University of Chicago.
In 1948 he went to work for Fortune magazine as its labour editor, a post he held for 10 years while writing some of his first books and articles.
He received a doctorate from Columbia in 1959 and taught at the university until 1969, when he moved to Harvard, where he was appointed Henry Ford II professor of social sciences in 1980.
Bell’s other books include Marxian Socialism in the United States (1952), an account of why the rigid tenets of Marxism failed in America’s freewheeling society; Work and Its Discontents (1956); The Reforming of General Education (1966); and The Social Sciences Since World War II (1981). A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 1987-88 Bell spent a year in Britain as Pitt Professor of American Institutions at Cambridge University.
Daniel Bell died on January 25. His first two marriages were dissolved, and he is survived by his third wife, Pearl, by their son and by a daughter of his first marriage.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/8404829/Daniel-Bell.html
“A corporation finds its people being straight by day and swingers by night,” he wrote. Western capitalism had come to rely on mass consumerism, acquisitiveness and easy credit, undermining the old Protestant virtues of thrift, discipline and restraint, and placing the future of the system itself in jeopardy.
Unlike many American public intellectuals of his ilk, Bell resisted political categorisation. He began as a Leftist in the 1930s but, in the 1960s, helped his friend Irving Kristol found The Public Interest, a journal destined in the 1980s to become a powerhouse for neoconservatism. But Bell and the journal had parted company long before.
Describing himself as a “socialist in economics, a liberal in politics and a conservative in culture”, Bell supported a modest welfare state while vehemently opposing all manifestations of modernism, which he considered a “great profanation” of art and culture – built on “the shambles and appetite of self-interest”.
He was born Daniel Bolotsky in New York on May 10 1919 to impoverished Jewish immigrants from Poland. His father, a garment worker, died when he was 10 months old, and Daniel spent part of his childhood in an orphanage while his widowed mother worked in a factory.
By the age of 13 Daniel had become an ardent socialist: “When I had my bar mitzvah,” he recalled, “I said to the Rabbi, 'I’ve found the truth. I don’t believe in God. I’m joining the Young People’s Socialist League.’ So he looked at me and said, 'Kid, you don’t believe in God. Tell me, do you think God cares?’”
After Stuyvesant High School, he entered City College, New York, which, in the late 1930s, was known for its young, mostly Jewish, students who spent hours debating Marxism in Alcove No 1 of the college canteen. Bell’s contemporaries included such future luminaries as the writers Irving Kristol and Irving Howe, the sociologists Nathan Glazer and Seymour Martin Lipset, and the art critic Harold Rosenberg.
After taking a degree in Sociology, Bell began writing for The New Leader magazine. Exempted from military service for medical reasons during the Second World War, he served as the magazine’s managing editor from 1941 to 1944, switching to a similar position at Common Sense magazine in 1945. In the same year he became an instructor at the University of Chicago.
In 1948 he went to work for Fortune magazine as its labour editor, a post he held for 10 years while writing some of his first books and articles.
He received a doctorate from Columbia in 1959 and taught at the university until 1969, when he moved to Harvard, where he was appointed Henry Ford II professor of social sciences in 1980.
Bell’s other books include Marxian Socialism in the United States (1952), an account of why the rigid tenets of Marxism failed in America’s freewheeling society; Work and Its Discontents (1956); The Reforming of General Education (1966); and The Social Sciences Since World War II (1981). A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 1987-88 Bell spent a year in Britain as Pitt Professor of American Institutions at Cambridge University.
Daniel Bell died on January 25. His first two marriages were dissolved, and he is survived by his third wife, Pearl, by their son and by a daughter of his first marriage.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/8404829/Daniel-Bell.html
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