Abstract
Who Was Daniel Bell?
A small photograph of Daniel Bell and Orlando Patterson in conversation sits on a bookshelf in my Cornell faculty office. Bell's face reflects intense determination as he makes some point to Patterson, who is listening to him with a politely serious expression. The photograph, taken at a Harvard sociology party in the early 1980s, captures a facet of Bell's personality. He was at the party but not partying. The essays that Paul Starr and Julian E. Zelizer solicited for Defining the Age: Daniel Bell, His Time and Ours capture Bell's multiple ways of being in places that he sometimes did not fully inhabit. Bell's insider/outsider status was a virtue, not a vice. It enabled him to see social facts that his more establishment colleagues often did not. Bell's journey from the lower east side of Manhattan to elite academia provides insights for a new generation of scholars who are making similar journeys. The work that Bell produced while making that journey is worthy of rediscovery by sociologists who know his writings minimally if at all.
As a tenured Professor at Harvard when women and persons of color were rare at the University and in the Sociology Department, Bell would appear to have little to say to a contemporary generation of scholars who are challenging the world that he seems to represent. But Starr and Zelizer's volume makes a compelling case that Bell is as relevant today as ever. Bell died in 2011. This essay collection came together in 2019 after a workshop at Princeton to reappraise Bell's career in honor of what would have been his 100th birthday. The workshop was an interdisciplinary gathering of academics, public intellectuals, family members, and former students. Younger scholars who only knew Bell through those parts of his writings that spoke to their research agendas contributed to the event.
Bell was among the most important public intellectuals of his generation. The dedication of the book, “To the next generation of intellectuals who take an ethics of public responsibility seriously,” describes how Bell thought of his mission and what he thought the proper role of intellectual inquiry should be. In the 1960s and 1970s when the idea of a global sociology was, apart from refugee scholars, virtually nonexistent, Bell's reputation extended beyond the United States and the profession of sociology. His disagreements with professional sociology, noted in the collection, were known. Yet in 1992, the American Sociological Association awarded him the Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award (renamed the W. E. B. Du Bois Award in 2006) “for a cumulative body of work that constitutes a significant contribution to the advancement of sociology.” The award suggests that the profession held Bell in high regard even if the admiration was not always shared.
Bell was born in 1919 to Eastern European Jewish parents. His father died when he was an infant. Relatives raised him while his mother worked in a factory to support her children. He graduated from City College of New York in 1938—a launchpad for smart but poor students of immigrant backgrounds who could neither afford nor gain admission to elite private schools. While there, Bell discovered his first intellectual attraction, Marxian Socialism, an attraction that he describes in his 1981 Partisan Review essay, “First Love and Early Sorrows.” He began his career as a journalist at the socialist publication The New Leader and then as a labor reporter for Fortune Magazine.
During the 1950s, Bell spent time abroad working with UNESCO's Congress of Cultural Freedom. In 1965, Bell was a founding editor along with Irving Kristol of The Public Interest, a neoconservative policy and culture journal. Commentators and academics often labeled Bell a conservative—a term that he rejected. He argued that his ideas and politics did not fit conventional analytic schemes. Eventually, Bell broke up with the “neo-cons” and left the editorial board of The Public Interest.
Academics was a second career for Bell. He was forty years old in 1959 when he began a tenured professorship in sociology at Columbia, which awarded him a doctoral degree based on his book The End of Ideology (1960). When Henry Luce asked Bell why he would leave journalism for academia, he famously quipped, "June, July and August.”
When Bell joined the faculty at Columbia, he had seen the world in ways that his colleagues had not. His practical experience in journalism and international affairs gave Bell a cosmopolitan vision of events and the contemporary moment that many of his fellow sociologists lacked. Bell had a wide-ranging intellect. He engaged with the world from his earliest days at City College, where he debated socialism in the cafeteria with his fellow students with whom he shared Jewish immigrant culture as well as politics. His peculiar vision of the aspiring outsider enabled him to see social life and political events in ways that classic insiders did not and was a continuing strength that colored Bell's academic writings as the years rolled on.
Bell’s early writings engaged theory, Marxism, labor politics, and social class. As the sixties turned into the seventies, he shifted his attention to the science of the future: “futurology.” He popularized the term “postindustrial society.” He was the first to draw connections between technology, capitalism, and the degradation of culture. He wrote and edited twelve books. His essays in journals and scholarly publications are voluminous. He often said that he specialized in “generalizations.” To Bell, the role of social science and intellectual inquiry more broadly was to make “relevant distinctions.”
In today's parlance, analysts would describe Bell as a “historian of the present.” His major works contextualized the present moment in terms of history. His most well-known books The End of Ideology (1960), The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) went into second and third editions. For each new edition, Bell wrote a new introduction in which he contemplated where things had changed, identified what he had missed, and answered his critics. One of my quibbles with this exceptionally lucid and readable collection is the lack of a Daniel Bell bibliographical essay at the end.
The Essays in the Volume
The underlying theme of Defining the Age is the intersection of individual biography and history. The book's twelve essays are chronological in that they follow Bell's intellectual preoccupations sequentially as he experienced unfolding events. Communism, fascism, Stalinism, the Cold War, and the student rebellions of the 1960s consume Bell's attention in his early writings, and these preoccupations never completely disappear. The essays in the volume are short and elegantly written but sometimes dense as they delve into the often overly qualified framework that underlays Bell's theorizing. The complexity of Bell's thinking often eludes facile summarization. The contributors to the book include Bell's son, the historian of modern France David Bell; his nephew, American historian Michael Kazin; and two of his former students, Paul Starr, one of the editors, and Steven Brint.
In their Introduction, Starr and Zelizer sketch the contours of Bell's life and intellectual journey. Bell was a Cold War intellectual in that he held a deep distrust of “isms,” particularly communism. His reactions against communism and Stalinism morphed into his antipathy to the young student rebels of the 1960s. He left Columbia in 1969 in part as a reaction to the student revolts on the New York campus that he and others were unable to quell. In the first essay in the volume, David Bell elegantly captures his father's personality and multiple preoccupations. David Bell's essay blends the personal and the public dimensions of Bell in ways that only a son, especially a son who is a talented professional historian, could do. David Bell's elegant exposition of the points where history and biography intersected in his father's life is a must-read.
Bell viewed himself as a social theorist. The second essay in the volume, by Paul Starr, captures how Bell theorized. Bell identified himself as “a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture.” Starr labels Bell's identification as his “three-dimensional puzzle.” Reflected in his rejection of economistic versions of Marxism, Bell was against purely structural accounts of social and economic life that lacked context and texture. He viewed the social world as composed of three realms: “the economy, politics, and culture—each governed by a different ‘axial’ principle: efficiency in the economy, equality in the political sphere, self-realization in the culture.”
These three realms govern Bell's writing as he tries to parse the meaning of unfolding events. Starr makes the point that Bell, a product of multiple intellectual influences, played a “brokerage role” (p. 60) among these different ideologies and traditions. Although his writing was clear and always forceful, he was often hard to pin down intellectually. One never missed the point that Bell was making—even if one missed the theory or disagreed with him. Bell's books were compendia of his various essays around a theme.
As Starr discusses, critics branded Bell as a conservative, but he was conservative only in culture, which he viewed broadly in the anthropological and material sense. Bell managed through his life to hold on to his early leftist beliefs in social justice and equality while having a firm commitment to capitalism as an economic system—but a more redistributive, social democratic form of capitalism, as illustrated in the last chapter of The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism: “The Public Household: On ‘Fiscal Sociology’ and the Liberal Society.” Bell's 1960 book The End of Ideology, subtitled On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, focused on the end of communism and fascism. It did not foresee the political exuberance, however short-lived, that the social movements of the sixties would generate in the United States and Europe. Bell did not anticipate the civil rights and anti-war protests. Yet the book contains many of his brilliant early essays on politics and conflict in American society. Bell began the 2000 edition of The End of Ideology with an essay on “The Resumption of History in the New Century.” In contrast to Francis Fukuyama's post-1989 essay “The End of History” that assumed worldwide commitment to democracy, Bell's assessment was more pessimistic. By the year 2000, as the Balkan wars raged on, Bell as well as others could see that democracy might not simply flow from the end of communism.
The next three essays in the collection, by Kazin, Zelizer and Jan-Werner Müller, address the political aspects of Bell's thought. Kazin discusses Bell's Marxian Socialism in the United States (1952). Bell's youthful attraction to socialism and the early Karl Marx, his horror at the McCarthy era, and his rejection of the American New Left figure in Kazin's discussion. In 1955, Bell edited an anthology, The New American Right, that was reissued as The Radical Right in 1963. Bell's essay “The Dispossessed,” contained in The Radical Right, is a surprisingly prescient account of changes in postwar American class structure that could be an analysis of Trump's electoral base. “The Dispossessed” speculates on how the loss of social status and economic possibility might affect the political behavior of white rural and lower middle classes left behind by outsourcing and the urban knowledge economy. Bell introduced the idea of status anxiety as a causal mechanism in political behavior. He did believe that American institutions would prevail and serve as a brake on the more radical positions that status discontent would generate.
The third section focuses on Bell's essays on work, technology, and culture. The social organization of modern labor occupied Bell in the 1960s. It is from that preoccupation that Bell coined the term “postindustrial society.” He was ahead of the curve in imagining the potential of as well as the dangers of technological advance. He was early to identify the relation between culture and technological change. He did not look at technology as simply an engine of efficiency and rationality. In this section, Starr's essay parses the distinctions between postindustrial and neoliberal. Margaret O’Mara analyzes Bell's writings in view of the development of Silicon Valley. Brint analyzes Bell's understanding of the knowledge class that postindustrial society would require to function. Bell understood that universities would need to grow to educate a new class of professional and technical middle-class elites. The last chapter in this section, by Jenny Andersson, focuses on Bell's interest in social forecasting.
In The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, Bell observed that “culture has replaced technology as a source of change in society, and the tensions between the adversary culture and eroded Protestant ethic have created a remarkable contradiction in the value system of American society” (p. 115). The last section of Defining the Age takes up this theme. Fred Turner examines The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), where Bell develops his theory of connection between capitalism and culture and excess. Bell deplored hedonism and the celebration of sexual freedom, which he saw blossoming in the sixties and seventies. Bell located these excesses in the student counterculture. Turner observes that the world of Silicon Valley unites excess and capitalism, but with a twist. Instead of hedonism as Bell described it, the gurus of Silicon Valley and their employees have capitulated to an aesthetic excess with juice bars, exercise rooms, and a 24/7 work culture. Excess and capitalism are key—not what constituted the excess. Bell believed in an administrative state that would distribute the bounty of capitalism through fair taxes and various subsidies. The book's final essay, by Stefan Eich, discusses financialization, a process Bell could not have foreseen that would truncate the public household that Bell desired.
What Might Current Sociology Learn from Daniel Bell's Writing?
Bell’s academic career ended in 1989, when he retired from Harvard. Ironically, given his intellectual obsessions, that was the year that the Berlin Wall came down and the history as well as the intellectual preoccupations of his generation ended. Bell lived for twenty-one more years, but his major writing was over.
The essays in Defining the Age tend to focus on what Bell got right and what he got wrong. But that is not the best metric to judge Bell's work and career, nor the best argument for why a new generation of social scientists should re-engage with his work. Bell got details wrong—and why not? Who could have imagined social media, the internet, or tech entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Jeff Bezos in 1973, when Bell popularized the term postindustrial society? He wrote before financialization, before global capitalism, when capitalism meant General Motors and its board of directors. Bell was not a seer with a crystal ball sitting in his office making predictions—no matter how much he admired “futurology.”
If Bell made errors, he was stunningly accurate in general. He identified for better or worse all the major trends of the millennium. His early writings on Marxism and social class and status and power speak to our current political moment. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973) was a masterpiece of vision—even if he was not alone in identifying the role of technology in the society of the future, no one synthesized it or drew in the role of culture as Bell did. Bell identified how capitalism caused cultural excesses that were parallel to the vast inequalities it created. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) identified the excess of capitalism in art and morality as well as inequality as the driving force of our age.
Bell did have blind spots. As the Introduction points out, he was overly optimistic about the racial struggles in the United States, which he felt would work themselves out through institutions (p. 17). Although he supported women's rights, in my own experience he was uncomfortable with women students. Although he considered himself on the periphery of professional sociology, he chaired or served on the dissertation committees of many leading sociologists of the last 40 years. Theda Skocpol and Margaret Somers, two of the most prominent women sociologists of their generation, had Bell as their dissertation advisor. In the “Acknowledgements” section of States and Social Revolutions, Skocpol wrote, “For encouraging me to undertake the impossible, I owe thanks to Daniel Bell, who also made detailed and provocative comments on the thesis draft.” Together with Paul Starr, Steven Brint (both in the volume), Mustafa Emirbayer, Joseph Soares, Michael Schudson, Grzegorz Ekiert, Andreas Glaeser, I was among his students.
Bell saw things in ways that others did not, although the evidence or facts were there for anyone to see. He was erudite and had an unquestionable love of learning. He wrote beautifully. His work on any subject he chose to engage—and he engaged everything—provided powerful social commentary on events that continue to concern social scientists. For that reason alone, we should read him now. His insights sprang from his insider/outsider status, what Starr refers to as Bell's “brokerage position,” insider/outsider in multiple worlds: the Jewish religion that he never abandoned; the Marxian socialism of his youth; and the white Protestant Harvard that he joined in 1969. Bell's work speaks to the power of the insider/outsider—one sees nothing if one is truly inside or truly outside. Bell's career trajectory and his writings suggest that social vision may come from liminality.
Bell was an observer, not an activist. His career provides encouragement to others that vision, creativity, freedom, and potential for activism lie in the in-between spaces of the institutions they inhabit. The essays in this volume introduce Bell to a new generation and display the sociological value of a life lived in multiples. To borrow from Georg Simmel, to be a stranger, near and remote, is the greatest analytic gift of all. And to end where I began, Bell was not partying in the picture, but he was smiling.