Bell, Daniel (1919—2011)
American sociologist, highly influential in the 1950s and 1960s. He is best known for his claims that western society has entered a period that is at once post-industrial society and post-ideological. Bell grew up in a poor family in New York. His father died when he was an infant and his mother worked in the garment industry. He studied ancient history at City College of New York, graduating in 1939. For the next two decades, he worked as a journalist, reporting on labour and industrial issues, picking up some part-time teaching at the University of Chicago and Columbia University along the way. In 1958 he made a definitive move into academia, taking a full-time position at Columbia in the Department of Sociology. Already prominent as a journalist, he was part of the group known as the ‘New York Intellectuals’ (who were generally left wing, but vehemently anti-communist), Bell’s star rose even higher with the publication of The End of Ideology (1960). Seemingly capturing the spirit of the times, Bell argued that technological and indeed technocratic solutions had replaced ideological solutions to the problem of how best to organize society. On the strength of this book, he was invited to join the President’s Commission on Technology in 1964. It was in this capacity, as a policy adviser, that he was able to exert the most influence, by translating his theoretical conclusions into practical suggestions. Bell moved to Harvard in 1969, and remained there for the rest of his career. The 1970s saw the publication of the two works that for many people summed up the decade as a whole and foreshadowed the rise of what would subsequently be known as postmodernism: The Coming of Post-industrial Society (1973) and its sequel The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976). Both these works argued for a sea-change in the composition of both the economy and the society of the West, particularly North America. In the first work he noted a trend in the US economy away from manufacturing towards the service industry or what today would be known as the information economy. In the second work, he argued that this change in the composition of the economy would present challenges to social cohesion because mass labour would no longer function as a ready source of integration. Both works have been subject to considerable debate, and are widely rejected by the Left, but they nonetheless remain influential testaments to the birth of the present era, which many still call post-industrial. Further Reading: M. Waters Daniel Bell (1996).