Bell, Daniel

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Daniel Bell (b. 1919) was born in New York City on May 10, to an immigrant Jewish family; though religion would later play a central role in his sociological theorizing, he considered his Jewishness to be ethnic ratherthan religious. He graduated from City College of New York in 1938, and after a year of graduate study at Columbia University spent the next twenty years in journalism, writing and editing for the New Leader, Fortune (as labor editor), and The Public Interest, which he cofounded with Irving Kristol in 1965. In 1958 he became an associate professor at Columbia, where he received a Ph.D. in 1960 and was promoted to full professor in 1962. In 1969 he moved to Harvard University, where he received a Henry Ford II endowed chair in 1980, from which he retired in 1990.

Bell's importance is based primarily on three books: The End of Ideology (1960); The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973); and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976). In these and related works, Bell defends a complex relation between science, technology, and ethics. On the one hand, he believes passionately in the science-based expertise of a technological elite; on the other, he clearly laments the loss of traditional cultural (including ethical) values in the anti-culture that accompanies technical elitism. As he explained in a new preface to the paperback edition of the third book just mentioned, he is "a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture." In elaboration:

(1) I am a socialist in economics. For me, socialism is not statism, or the collective ownership of the means of production. It is a judgment on the priorities of economic policy. I believe that in this realm, the community takes precedence over the individual. (2) I am a liberal in politics—defining both terms in the Kantian sense. I am a liberal in that, within the polity, I believe the individual should be the primary actor, not the group. And the polity has to maintain the distinction between the public and the private. (3) I am a conservative in culture because I respect tradition; I believe in reasoned judgments of good and bad about the qualities of a work of art. I use the term culture to mean less than the anthropological catchall and more than the aristocratic tradition which restricts culture to refinement and to the high arts. Culture, for me, is the effort to provide a coherent set of answers to the existential predicaments that confront all human beings. (Bell 1979, pp. xii, xiv, xv)

In a critical intellectual biography, Malcolm Waters (1996) questions all three self-characterizations by challenging the sociological distinctions in which they are grounded. Adapting the structural-functionalism of Talcott Parsons, Bell rejects any holistic understanding of contemporary society and instead distinguishes between three realms, each ruled by a different axial principle and displaying a different axial structure. In terms of their different central values, the techno-economic realm pursues material growth, the polity consent of the governed, and cultural novelty or originality. Each of these three realms may also be characterized by special relationships between the individual and the social order, basic processes, and structural problematics. Waters summarizes these distinctions in a grid supplied by Bell himself (see Figure 1).

Waters's criticisms—which are those of a friendly critic who is convinced that Bell is a major sociological theorist—are as follows. First, with regard to economic socialism, Bell's position is singularly weak. It entails no more than commitment to a minimum standard of living, for example in health care. A more robust socialist would question the capitalist ownership of the means of production. In fact in the economic sphere Bell is no more than a liberal.

Second, with regard to political liberalism, Bell is more convincing. "Bell makes explicit statements consistent with Jeffersonian democracy about individual rights, small government (notwithstanding a grudging

FIGURE 1
The General Schema of Society

Realm	Techno-economic (social) Structure	Polity	Culture
SOURCE: Adapted from Waters (1996), p. 35.
Axial principle	Functional rationality	Equality	Self-realization
Axial structure	Bureaucracy	Representation	Reproduction of meanings and artifacts
Central value-orientation	Material growth	Consent of the governed	Novelty and originality
Relationship of individual to social order	Role segmentation	Participatory	Sovereignty of the whole person
Basic processes	Specialization and substitution	Bargaining and legal reconciliation	Disruption of genres by syncretism
Structural problematics	Reification	Entitlements, meritocracy and centralization	Postmodernist anti-nomianism

approval of the New Deal) and the sanctity of the private sphere. [However] in [Post-Industrial Society] politics is not a source of last-resort interventions but rather an arena within which primary steering, namely planning, takes place" (Waters 1996, p. 168).

Third, with regard to cultural conservatism, Waters accepts this self-characterization but sees a problem with "his insistence that the three realms are [interdependent]. If he wants a return to authoritative standards in culture then there must be a source of such standards, and its only possibility is an illiberal state" (Waters 1996, p. 168–169).

Waters concludes that Bell is neither a neo-conservative, socialist, nor much of a liberal. "Despite all interest in the future possibilities of technology and post-industrialism Bell is an old-fashioned, traditionalistic, elitist conservative" (Waters 1996, p. 169). Bell might respond that Waters has simply misunderstood the nuances of his positions, while others, especially leftist critics, have good grounds for arguing that Bell is a neo-conservative despite his denials.

Critical Social Theory;; Democracy;; Industrial Revolution;; Information Society;; Socialism.

Bell, Daniel. (1960). The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

Bell, Daniel. (1973). The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting. Basic Books.

Bell, Daniel. (1976). The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books. Paperback edition with new preface was published in 1979; twentieth anniversary edition with a new 50-page afterward by the author was published in 1996.

Waters, Malcolm. (1996). Daniel Bell. London: Routledge. A critical but favorable intellectual biography.

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