Daniel Bell
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| Daniel Bell | |
| Born | May 10, 1919 (age 90) New York |
|---|---|
| Fields | sociology |
| Institutions | Harvard University |
| Known for | Post-industrialism |
Daniel Bell (born 10 May 1919 in New York City) 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, fourteen universities in the United States, and Keio University, in Japan. Currently he lives in Cambridge, Mass., 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 bachelor of science and social science. 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 agazine (1965-1973). In 1960 Columbia University awarded him a Ph.D. degree. He taught sociology first at Columbia (1959–1969) and then at Harvard until his retirement in 1990. Bell also was a visiting don at Cambridge 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.
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 Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt, had two books so listed.
Bell's son, David A. Bell, is a dean and 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
Daniel Bell described himself as a "socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture." In his collection of essays The End of Ideology, he argued that political ideology has become irrelevant among "sensible" people, and that the polity of the future would be driven by piecemeal technological adjustments of the extant system. At the time, Bell was attacked by political critics, left-wing and otherwise. Broadly speaking, hostile 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 outspoken anti-Stalinism. [He had been a social democrat in his youth.]
- 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. (Actually, Bell anticipated this in his book. He did, however, fail to anticipate the resurgence of "free market" ideology in the 1970s.)
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.
His concept has been especially infuriating to Marxists because it offers an alternative macro-historical vision to their commiseration of the proletariat and establishment of a classless society. Since the publication of Bell's book, many of the forecasts have proved accurate.
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