Daniel Bell
| Daniel Bell | |
|---|---|
| Born | May 10, 1919 New York |
| Fields | Sociology |
| Institutions | Harvard University |
| Known for | Post-industrialism |
Daniel Bell (born May 10, 1919 in New York City) is a sociologist and a professor emeritus at Harvard University best known for his seminal contributions to post-industrialism, and has been described as "one of the leading American intellectuals of the postwar era."[1]
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[edit] Background
Bell was born in 1919 in the Lower East Side of New York City. His father died when he was eight months old, and he grew up living with relatives along with his mother and siblings.[2]
Bell graduated from City College of New York with a bachelor of science and social science in 1938, and studied for one year further at Columbia University (1938–39).[2][1] He 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 later co-editor (with his college friend Irving Kristol) of The Public Interest magazine (1965–1973). In 1960, Columbia awarded him a Ph.D. degree. He taught sociology first at Columbia (1959–1969) and then at Harvard until his retirement in 1990.[3]
Bell also was the visiting Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University in 1987. 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.[citation needed]
Bell has received honorary degrees from Harvard, the University of Chicago, fourteen universities in the United States, and Keio University in Japan. 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.[citation needed]
Bell is also a director of Suntory Foundation and a scholar in residence of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[citation needed]
Bell once described himself as a "socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture."[4]
[edit] Scholarship
Bell 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) [5] and The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973).[6] 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 Isaiah Berlin, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Albert Camus, George Orwell and Hannah Arendt, had two books so listed.[7]
[edit] The End of Ideology
Main article: The End of Ideology
In The End of Ideology, Bell suggests that the older grand humanistic ideologies derived from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are exhausted, and that new more parochial ideologies will soon arise.
[edit] The Coming of Post-Industrial Society
In The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, 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. Bell discussed the manuscript of The Coming of Post-Industrial Society with Talcott Parsons before its publication.
[edit] The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism
In The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Bell submits that that the culture created by capitalism generates a need for personal gratification among the successful, and that this will harm the work ethic that caused that success of capitalism in the first place.[8]
[edit] Personal
Bell's son, David A. Bell,[9] is a professor of French history at Princeton 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.[10]
Currently Bell lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife Pearl Bell, a scholar of literary criticism.
[edit] Selected bibliography
- The End of Ideology (1960)
- The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, Daniel Bell. New York: Basic Books, 1973, ISBN 0-465-01281-7
- The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)
[edit] References
- ^ a b Durham Peters, John, and Simonson, Peter (eds.) Mass communication and American social thought: key texts, 1919-1968, p.364-65 (2004) (ISBN 978-0742528390)
- ^ a b Waters, Malcom. Key Sociologists: Daniel Bell, p. 13-16 (Routledge 1996) (ISBN 978-0415105774)
- ^ Jumonville, Neil, ed. The New York intellectuals reader, Ch.17 (2007) (ISBN 978-0415952651)
- ^ Gardner, Martin. The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener, p. 427 (1999 paperback ed.)
- ^ Williams, Raymond. How can we sell the Protestant ethic at a psychedelic bazaar?: The Cultural Contradictions Of Capitalism (book review, The New York Times, February 1, 1976
- ^ Waters, Malcolm. Daniel Bell, in The Blackwell companion to major contemporary social theorists (Ritzer, George, ed.) (2003) (ISBN 978-1405105958)(Waters identifies these as the "three works that made Bell famous")
- ^ The hundred most influential books since the war, Times Literary Supplement, December 30, 2008
- ^ Liu, Eric. How Boomers Left Us With an Ethical Deficit, The Atlantic, September 24, 2010 ("When Daniel Bell wrote of the cultural contradictions of capitalism -- that a self-denying work ethic leads to the affluence that gives rise to self-gratifying play ethic that ends up corroding the affluence - he could also have described the life cycle of the Boomers.")
- ^ WEDDINGS; Donna Farber, David A. Bell, The New York Times, May 24, 1993
- ^ Alumni, The University of Chicago Magazine, Vol. 93, p.41 (2000) (noting that Jordy Bell is associate academic dean at Marymount)
