Bell, Daniel

Publications

Bell rose to public prominence for his 1960 book The End of Ideology, a collection of essays analyzing changes in U.S. society in the 1950s. The book argued that the major ideologies of the 19th century—market liberalism and Marxism—were exhausted in Europe and the United States, and that intellectuals had moved toward a more pragmatic standpoint. Although he recognized the continuing appeal of Marxist ideas to youthful radicals, he failed to anticipate the revival of free market economics in the 1970s and 1980s. His next major contribution was The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), which elaborated ideas that Bell had been developing in articles published in the 1960s. Bell was hardly alone in the 1960s and early 1970s in arguing that society was crossing a major threshold from one epoch to another. C. Wright Mills had written as early as 1960 of a transition to a “post-modern society,” and the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution had focused on the rapid progress of automation in its 1964 documents. In France, Serge Mallet and Andre Gorz analyzed the emergence of a “new working class” with substantially higher levels of skill, and Czech philosopher Radovan Richta published Civilization at the Crossroads (1966), which elaborated the idea of a scientific and technological revolution that was transforming modern societies.

Nevertheless, Bell's formulations became the most influential and widely cited arguments for a fundamental shift in social development. Bell developed his argument in an analogy with the transition from an agricultural society to an industrial society. During this transition, it was not that farming disappeared or ceased to be important for feeding the population, but that there was a rapid decline in the percentage of the population working in agriculture, and manufacturing quickly became the most important economic activity. Hence, Bell saw the key markers of the shift to postindustrial society as the rising share of the labor force in services and the growing role of science and technology in all types of production processes. Bell's argument was not that manufacturing was disappearing, but that it would employ a shrinking share of the labor force and that key progress in manufacturing would come from advances in science and technology, developed not in factories but in universities.

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