Daniel Bell obituary
Influential social observer best known as the author of The End of Ideology
Daniel Bell, who has died aged 91, was a widely influential social observer and emeritus professor of social sciences at Harvard University. He is best remembered as the author of The End of Ideology (1960), and as one of the last of the New York intellectuals who travelled the distance from the leftism of the 1930s to the neoconservatism of the 1970s-80s and the uncertain middle ground beyond.
The End of Ideology, a collection of his earlier essays, portrayed a non-capitalist or post-capitalist order in which the classic conditions of the market no longer existed, and in which widespread political dissatisfaction was no longer based in economics. True radical thought, he insisted, would now turn upon the "relationship of culture to society". Greeted as one of the most provocative works of the era, the book ironically secured Bell's reputation as a 1950s-style thinker, unsettled if not actually disproven by subsequent developments.
Born Daniel Bolotsky in New York to impoverished Jewish immigrants, Bell spent part of his childhood in an orphanage while his widowed mother worked in a factory. At 13, he became an ardent leftwinger and received his first real intellectual training in a socialist Sunday school.
Repelled by communism and also by the prospect of sudden social change within the US, he enlisted in the most moderate wing of the American left, the Social Democratic Federation of America. Bell also attended the City College of New York, and drew close to such personal allies of his later years as the future neoconservative savant Irving Kristol. Bell's own vision of social change was increasingly guided, meanwhile, by a reading of the philosopher John Dewey and his espousal of a mildly socialist "mixed economy", balanced between private and public ownership. In 1939 Bell completed a ! master's degree in sociology at Columbia University.
In 1941 he joined the staff of the New Leader magazine, nominally the organ of the Social Democratic Federation but generally a forum for wide liberal discussion. Fiercely anti-communist, the magazine and its surrounding milieu had begun a phased withdrawal from traditional socialist assumptions. Through wartime, as the New Leader assailed the inherent irresponsibility of corporate ownership and the longterm dangers posed by the concentration of economic and political power, Bell focused his attention upon the business influence exerted over Franklin Roosevelt's "win-the-war" administration.
Bell also edited, for two years, the Bulletin of the Union for Democratic Action, precursor of the postwar liberal anti-communist pressure group Americans for Democratic Action. In 1944 he resigned from the New Leader. Shortly thereafter, he began teaching at Chicago University and writing for Commentary magazine, an increasingly important forum for Jewish intellectuals leaning rightward with the onset of the cold war.
Bell reached an intellectual turning point with the abandonment of a contracted book explaining his theory of a monopoly capitalist state. His rejection (as he later put it) of a "vulgar Marxist framework" led him to the staff of Fortune magazine in 1948, where as labour editor he proposed very different views of economics and modern society.
At the University of Chicago, he had grown sceptical about the desirability of any fundamental economic transformation. He had also grown closer to the sociological framework of Max Weber and the pessimistic theology of Reinhold Niebuhr as he substituted social "interests" and moral reservations for what he now considered outmoded leftwing class categories and anti-business bias. In what many would consider a touchstone of changed political affiliations, he worked closely during the 1950s with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, later disclosed to have been sponsored by the CIA.
But Bell, wh! o took a PhD at Columbia University and taught sociology there from 1952 to 1969, presented no rosy picture of current society. A leading student of the welfare state, he shrewdly observed its various contradictions. The fragmentation of communal ties, the uniform bureaucratisation of organisations, the widespread feelings of helplessness and dependence all suggested to Bell a pervasive "disenchantment" which he interpreted as the end of industrialism's earlier dominant ideologies. If he therefore viewed the disappearance of liberal or socialist utopianism as a positive and realistic step, he also concluded that the old hopes for a rationally organised society had declined with the demise of unrealistic expectations.
Bell's scepticism suited the intellectual mood of the 1950s, and he enjoyed great prominence among highly influential sociologists and social critics including David Riesman, Irving Howe and Nathan Glazer.
The explosive social movements of the later 1960s and 1970s palpably deepened the conservative elements in Bell's thought. If the earlier civil rights movement had little impact on his theories, the peace movement and above all the campus restlessness seemed to him ominous reminders of mass irrationality. He saw in the rebel a potentially destructive individual seeking self-definition in a modernity which denied real purposefulness to radicalism. But he granted that liberalism also offered no satisfying solutions.
In 1965 he joined his old friend Kristol in founding The Public Interest, along with its sister journal, The National Interest, destined to become the keenest intellectual forum for what came to be called neoconservatism. Bell, however, declined to follow Kristol all the way into the Republican camp, resigning from co-editorship of the journal in 1976 and from its publications committee in 1982. Often describing himself as a "socialist in economics, a liberal in politics and a conservative in culture", he continued to signal himself the supporter of a modest welfare sta! te and a centrist Democratic party, while an unreserved opponent of the counterculture.
As chair of the Presidential Commission on the Year 2000, Bell stressed the problems of a post-industrial economy, modern society's technocratic structure versus its hedonistic culture, and the increasingly unrealistic levels of public and private expectations. His books The Coming of Post Industrial Society (1973) and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) further elaborated these arguments. Bell pointed to the virtual dissolution of the work ethic for instant gratification, and to the inability of liberalism to deal with the consequences. "Post-industrialism", essentially a meritocracy based on education and skills, inevitably prompted unrest and resentment among those left behind. The liberal quest for absolute "equality" (epitomised in affirmative action for non-whites or women) encouraged adversarial attitudes and undermined appropriate legitimation.
Critics often pointed to Bell's oversimplified view of modernity's class structure, the unlikely prospect of meritocracy ever outweighing other sources of privilege, and the inability of his theories to account for the Vietnam war and subsequent "low-intensity" US international involvements. To these complaints and others, Bell seemed willing to yield slightly. He warned, for instance, that with massive degradation of natural resources, corporations might fail the test that they used for themselves in an earlier era, their very productivity and their capacity to sustain abundance.
More generally, he mourned the absence of any "transcendent ethic" or "meaningful purpose" to postmodern life. The collapse of communism found Bell triumphantly lecturing in Moscow, but also concerned that the west had apparently learned little from its victory. The deepening division between rich and poor (or salary between chief executive and blue-collar worker), the continuing appeal of affirmative action and multiculturalism to liberals, the relative absence of democ! ratic so cial foresight and planning all pointed to basic and unresolved dilemmas.
Towards the end of his life, hailed as coiner of phrases such as the "information economy" and "post-industrialism", Bell continued to lay claim on an eroded 1950s-style political liberalism staggering under blows from the Republican right. Henry Ford professor of social sciences at Harvard from 1980 onwards, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the recipient in 1992 of its Talcott Parsons prize in social sciences, he also continued probing the historic relationships of technology and science to the economy. Asked in graduate student days about his field of study, Bell had replied: "I specialise in generalisations." Towards that goal he remained more than faithful.
He is survived by his wife, Pearl, whom he married in 1960, a son, David, a daughter, Jordy, four grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
Daniel Bell (Bolotsky), sociologist, born 10 May 1919; died 25 January 2011
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