Daniel Bell
Daniel Bell was a prominent American sociologist and theorist known for his influential ideas on the evolution of society and the impact of ideology. Born to Polish Jewish immigrant parents in New York's Lower East Side, Bell's early life was marked by financial hardship and the loss of his father at a young age. He initially joined the Young People's Socialist League during his adolescence, which shaped his early political views.
After completing his education at City College of New York and Columbia University, Bell gained recognition for his seminal work, "The End of Ideology," where he argued that traditional political ideologies had become irrelevant in the context of American society's growth and complexities. His later research, including "The Coming of Post-Industrial Society," predicted significant shifts toward an information-based economy, highlighting the decline of industrial production.
Bell also examined the cultural changes in capitalism, notably in his work "The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism." He held prestigious academic positions, notably at Harvard University, and earned multiple awards for his contributions to sociology. Even into his later years, Bell continued to engage in scholarly work, including insights on contemporary Chinese society. His legacy endures as he remains a key figure in understanding modern socio-economic transformations.
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Subject Terms
Daniel Bell
Scholar, sociologist, and journalist
- Born: May 10, 1919
- Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
- Died: January 25, 2011
Bell is a leading futurist who predicted the end of ideological concerns in the 1960’s and the waning of traditional industrial production for Japan and the Western nations.
Early Life
The son of Benjamin Bolotsky and Anna Kaplan, Polish Jewish immigrants, Daniel Bell grew up in poverty on New York’s lower East Side. His father died when Bell was six months old, and his mother worked long hours in a garment factory to make ends meet. Much of Bell’s childhood was spent in a Jewish day orphanage. His first language was Yiddish, and he did not master English until he began to attend public school at the age of six. By the age of thirteen, with the Great Depression dampening the economy, Bell had read Karl Marx and joined the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL), the youth organization of the American Socialist Party. Unlike the Young Communist League, YPSL espoused evolutionary democratic socialism rather than violent revolutionary communism.
When he was legally adopted by his uncle, an Americanized dentist, his surname was changed to Bell. He graduated from high school at the age of sixteen and then attended City College of New York, where he continued membership in YPSL and majored in sociology, along with others who would become leading sociologists, such as Seymour Lipset and Nathan Glazer.
Bell graduated in 1938 with a B.S. degree in sociology and began graduate studies at Columbia University. He also began writing articles for The New Leader, a magazine founded by members of the Socialist Party of America, later becoming its managing editor, and he became the managing editor of Common Sense, another Socialist publication. Medical issues prevented him from being drafted into the military during World War II.
Life’s Work
From 1945 to 1948, Bell served as a social science instructor at the University of Chicago. In 1948, he became labor editor for Fortune magazine and continued this work while serving as a part-time sociology lecturer at Columbia University. He was promoted to associate professor at Columbia in 1958 and finally received his doctoral degree in 1960, the same year that his book, The End of Ideology, launched his reputation as a major American thinker. In the work, Bell argued that the ideologies of the political left, including Marxism, and other ideologies that evolved during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were irrelevant to the American experience. This was because of the tremendous growth of the public sector and the systemic capacity of the existing political system to resolve inequalities. Attacked by the political left as a “sellout” to the consensus movement, Bell earned a full professorship at Columbia in 1962 based on the success of the book.
Bell’s appointment in 1965 by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as chairman of the Commission of the Year 2000 caused him to focus on futurism. Bell’s landmark study, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), predicted the advent of an information-based and a service-oriented society rooted in new technological elites, information, and statistical manipulations. The days of industrial production for the industrialized nations would rapidly fade into history. His Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) exposed the evolution of thrift-directed virtues into an ever-increasing irresponsible consumer ethic of “buy now, pay later.” In 1969, Bell left a Columbia University torn by the protests against the Vietnam War for a full professorship in sociology at Harvard University. He remained at Harvard until 1990.
Bell received numerous awards for his work, including the American Sociological Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award (1992), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Talcott Parsons Prize for the Social Sciences (1993), and France’s Alexis de Tocqueville Prize (1993). In 1999, as the millennium approached, a thoroughly updated version of the prophetic The Coming of Post-Industrial Society was published.
Even in his nineties, Bell continued his long career of insightful analysis. He was the first foreigner hired since the Cultural Revolution to teach humanities at Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University. His reflections and experiences resulted in the publication by Princeton University Press in 2008 of China’s New Confucianism and Everyday Life in a Changing Society, which was updated and published as a paperback in 2010. The work is hailed as a combination of scholarship and keen observations of everyday life.
Bell moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his third wife, Pearl Kazin, a scholar of literary criticism, whom he married in 1960. Their son, David, became a dean and a professor of French history at Johns Hopkins University. His daughter, Jordy Bell, from his first marriage in 1943 to Nora Potashnik, served as administrator and teacher of women’s history at Marymount College in Tarrytown, New York, until her retirement in 2005.
Significance
A leading sociologist in futuristic studies of the direction of American political and economic development, Bell defined the basic issues that industrialized Western societies must face in order to maintain progress and stability as the new millennium approached. He coined the concept of the post-industrial society. His two significant studies, The End of Ideology and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, were listed on the Times Literary Supplement among the one hundred most important books in the second half of the twentieth century.
Bibliography
Liebowitz, Nathan. Daniel Bell and the Agony of Modern Liberalism. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Greenwood Press, 1985. An analysis of Bell’s works as a journalist and a futurist sociologist, based on extensive interviews and a thorough knowledge of Bell’s writings.
Waters, Malcolm. Daniel Bell. New York: Routledge, 1996. A study of Bell’s major and minor works and an examination of his preoccupations.
Webster, Frank. Theories of the Information Society. New York: Routledge, 2002. An eminent British sociologist examines divergent theories about the information society and post-technological age.