In Memoriam: Daniel Bell (1919-2011)

Daniel Bell, the distinguished and influential American sociologist and social theorist, died at the age of 91 years in January, 2011. Bell had an amazingly wide range of interests and knowledge. While he could be called a sociologist—he had served as a professor of sociology at Columbia University, and then as Henry Ford II Professor of Sociology at Harvard University—his academic life came after a long and varied career in serious journalism, as managing editor of the socialist weekly The New Leader, as editor of Common Sense, and as an editor and writer on the American business magazine Fortune. He also founded, with Irving Kristol, and edited for some years, the influential American quarterly The Public Interest.

Bell was born on New York City's Lower East Side, then an enormous concentration of poor Jewish immigrants. He lost his father at an early age, and was raised in difficult economic circumstance. He was able to gain admittance to Stuyvesant High School, a public school for bright students, open on the basis of examination, and he then attended the free City College of New York, one of the very few institutions of higher education in the United States that did not charge tuition fees. Even as a teenager he became an active socialist, and shortly after graduating from City College, in his early twenties he became managing editor of The New Leader, which was defined by its fierce opposition to Communism, as was true of American socialists generally. Bell became a central figure in New York's intellectual life, wrote widely for various publications, and became active in the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an international organization devoted to fighting Communist influence in the arts and cultural life. Raymond Aron was one of the founders of the Congress. One of its main activities was to sponsor journals open to a wide range of non-Communist opinion and criticism, among them Preuves (in French), Der Monat (in German), and Encounter (in London), the latter two founded by City College classmates of Bell, Irving Kristol and Melvin Lasky. In 1956-7 Bell lived in Paris, organizing international seminars and conferences for the Congress.

In 1960, he published the first of three influential books, which define his impact on the intellectual life of our times. The End of Ideology, a collection of essays and papers, argued that major ideological conflict was at an end, in the wake of the collapse of Fascism, and the intellectual emptiness of contemporary Communism and Marxism, and that political life in the future would be defined more by conflict over the bounds of a social democratic service state than by major ideological controversy. The thesis was sharply disputed but Bell defended his position in many subsequent editions of the book, the most recent published in the year 2000, by which time his thesis appeared more prescient and premature than incorrect. However disputed, The End of Ideology, with its provocative title, raised a long-standing controversial issue in the intellectual life of the second half of the twentieth century.

In 1959, Bell became professor of sociology in Columbia University, though he then had no advanced degree in the field: His was the kind of appointment that became much less likely in subsequent years. After the student disorders at Columbia in 1968, which raised for him, as for others, a serious conflict between his attachment to the radicalism of his youth and his respect for the university as a major institution sustaining intellectual and cultural life and creativity, Bell moved to Harvard University. He then published the two major works by which he is best known: The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973) and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976). These two books define some of the major tendencies of our times: The rise of information—and service—based societies, succeeding the age of industrial mass production, and a distinctive contemporary crisis of capitalist society, as its driving motivations stimulate the creation and expansion of a culture that undermines its moral basis. These books, like his others, have often been reprinted, with additional introductions and epilogues dealing with subsequent...