Daniel Bell, the Once Famed New York Intellectual
Daniel Bell, who recently turned 80, cuts an odd figure on the intellectual
landscape. Although he is generally considered to be the greatest living
American sociologist, surprisingly few people today have heard of him. (He is
probably better known in Europe than in the United States.) There is no Bellian
school of sociological thought. He has been called "a sage without a
following." In the '70s, when the book we are discussing was originally
published, he had a higher profile. One survey placed him among the "ten most
respected intellectuals in America." No doubt that had something to do with his
1960 volume of essays, The End of Ideology , which Bell himself once
called "the most cited and least read of books."
Although Bell did not coin the term "post-industrial," it was his book that
launched it into the popular lexicon, where it was subsequently banalized by
untold mindless repetitions. That, of course, is not Bell's fault. Indeed, it
was with some excitement that I opened this new edition of The Coming of
Post-Industrial Society , hoping to recover the rigorous and prescient
thinking behind the cliché. I was also curious to see how Bell, in a newly
written foreword of some 80 pages, would retrospectively appraise the validity
of his theorizing and the accuracy of his predictions.
I don't know about you, David, but I was at first put off by the rather
unleavened prose, the endless morphological distinctions ("systems," "orders,"
"spheres," "situses," "axial principles," "dimensions" ...), and the paragraphs
full of academic throat-clearing ("But the limitations of forecasting are also
evident. The further one reaches ahead in time with a set of forecasts, the
greater the margin for error, since the fan of projections widens")--not to
mention the typos, factual errors, and shoddy copy-editing of the new
foreword.
Bell may have been one of the more sparkling of the New York intellectuals
in his heyday; and he was also, of course, a writer for Henry Luce's
Fortune in the '50s (and has even retained some Time-ese tics,
such as referring to Plato in a footnote as "the famed Greek philosopher"). But
he has been, since the 1960s, an academic sociologist, first at Columbia (which
gave him a PhD after they hired him for his writings as a public intellectual)
and then, since 1969, at Harvard. And sociologists cannot help generating
grand, sterile, abstract schematics to describe society.
Curiously, if you look at the wonderful anthology of parodies that Dwight
Macdonald put together long ago, you will find a burlesque of sociologese by
Daniel Bell, called "The Parameters of Social Movements: A Formal Paradigm,"
which was allegedly a revision of an earlier scheme titled "The Configurative
Patterning of Social Movements." The parody is not all that funny. What is
hilarious is that a couple of sociological colleagues to whom he sent it
mistook it for the real thing. One of them, he writes, "sent me back a serious
letter about some of the categories, while the other, not knowing whether it
was a spoof or not, wrote: 'You are too good a sociologist not to have created
something which itself is quite useful.' And a third asked me for a copy of my
'earlier scheme.' "
I seem to have left it to you, David, to say just what Daniel Bell means by
the "post-industrial" society. Forgive me.
