Daniel Bell
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| Daniel Bell | |
 Daniel Bell
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| Born | 10 May 1919 New York |
|---|---|
| Fields | sociology |
| Institutions | Harvard University |
| Known for | post-industrialism |
Daniel Bell (born 10 May 1919 in New York) is a sociologist and a professor emeritus at Harvard University. He is also a director of Suntory Foundation and a scholar in residence of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received honorary degrees from Harvard, the University of Chicago, Brandeis University, and fourteen universities in the United States, including Keio University, in Japan. In 1990, Bell retired as professor of sociology at Harvard University. Currently he lives in Cambridge, MA with his wife Pearl Bell, a literary criticism scholar. He has received the "Lifetime Achievement Award" by the American Sociological Association in 1992, and the Talcott Parsons Prize for the Social Sciences by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993. He was also given the Tocqueville Award by the French Government in 1995.
Bell graduated from City College of New York with a B.S.S. (bachelor of science and social science) in ancient history in 1939 rather than sociology, at the behest of his academic advisor, Moses Finkelstein, who later went to England and then changed his name to Moses Finley. Daniel Bell started his career as a journalist, being a managing editor of The New Leader magazine (1941–1945), a labor editor of Fortune (1948–1958) and a co-founder of The Public Interest Magazine (1965). In 1960 Columbia University awarded him with a Ph.D. degree. He taught sociology first at Columbia University (1959–1969) and then at Harvard University. He served as a member of President’s Commission on Technology in 1964–1965 and as member of President’s Commission on a National Agenda for the 1980s in 1979. Bell was among the original New York Intellectuals, a group of anti-Stalinist left-wing writers.
He is best known for his contributions to post-industrialism. His most influential books are The End of Ideology (1960), The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) and The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973). Two of his books, the End of Ideology and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism were listed by the Times Literary Supplement as among the 100 most important books in the second half of the twentieth century. Only two other authors, Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt, had two books so listed. (David Riesman and John Kenneth Galbraith each has one).
Bell's son, David A. Bell, is a professor of French history at Johns Hopkins University, and his daughter, Jordy Bell, was an academic administrator and teacher of, among other things, U.S. Women's history at Marymount College, Tarrytown, New York, before her retirement in 2005.
[edit] The End of Ideology
The End of Ideology has been influential in what was called endism. This is the idea that both history and ideology have been reduced to insignificance because Western democratic politics and capitalism have triumphed. At the time, Bell was attacked by political critics, left-wing and otherwise. They claimed that Bell had replaced a sense of reality with theoretical elegance, arguing that he privileged 'endism' more than he did historical accuracy. In his own words, Bell describes himself as a "socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture."
Broadly speaking, criticism of The End of Ideology boiled down to five general concerns:
- It was a defense of the post-1945 status quo.
- It was downplaying genuine political debate in favor of 'technocratic guidance' from social and cultural elites.
- It was substituting consensus for moral discourse.
- Its intellectual honesty was compromised by its author's participation in emerging Cold War discourses.
- It was disproven by the return of radical discontentment in politics, marked by the 1960s and 1970s youth agitations in the West and the rise of extremist politics in the Third World.
In The Coming of Post-Industrial Society Bell outlined a new kind of society - the post-industrial society. He argued that post-industrialism would be information-led and service-oriented. Bell also argued that the post-industrial society would replace the industrial society as the dominant system. There are three components to a post-industrial society, according to Bell:
- a shift from manufacturing to services
- the centrality of the new science-based industries
- the rise of new technical elites and the advent of a new principle of stratification
Bell also conceptually differentiates between three aspects of the post-industrial society: data, or information describing the empirical world, information, or the organization of that data into meaningful systems and patterns such as statistical analysis, and knowledge, which Bell conceptualizes as the use of information to make judgments.
Since the publication of his book, many of the predictions have turned true.
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