Daniel Bell, 1919 - 2011

Daniel Bell, who died on January 25, 2011, was one of the most profound thinkers of the 20th century, someone whose vision reached well into the 21st.

Bred in the hardscrabble life of New York immigrant Yiddish-keit, rabbinical thought, the Young People's Socialist League, and street-corner politics, Bell brought an omnivorous and joyful appetite to his understanding of the world. His prescience about so many aspects of our present world, from the problems of prosperity to the evolution of class conflict, had its sources in extraordinarily keen apprehension of the world he lived in. As he wrote in Twelve Modes of Prediction, his method was not crystal-ball-gazing, but what-if thought-experiments based on significant observable facts.

And these he had at his disposal in dazzling abundance, from his days as a street-corner orator, labor editor of Fortune, and reader of everything of interest in philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, religion, literature, art, science, and popular culture. His public-speaking skills were honed at an early age -- 13. No sooner a bar-mitzvah boy than he learned -- from Eugene V Debs, no less -- how to sway a crowd. From Marx and Hegel, he acquired a world-historical sweep of knowledge, and the confidence that enabled him to reject specialization.

Henry Luce knew what he was doing when he hired Daniel Bell to write for Fortune. What better choice than an agitator with street-smarts, and a veteran of the Lenin-Trotsky debates waged in the study carrels of New York's City College, to write about labor-management issues? Reading Bell's essay on The Racket-Ridden Longshoremen is the best possible preparation for seeing the movie On the Waterfront. Both the essay and the film were products of the ongoing disenchantment with the socialist 'god that failed', a clear-eyed look at the sequelae of leftist utopias, foreshadowing the demise of the heroic role of the proletariat as agent of social change.

A journalist without academic credentials, when asked by a Columbia faculty committee to state his specialty, he responded 'I specialize in generalizations' -- quel chutzpah! (what cheek!). He got away with that, and more. His lively writing style, informed by a wealth of life-experience, proved thoroughly compatible with the most acute statistical analysis and interpretation, and immune to the distractions of ideology. Shorn of Marxist ideology, but retaining the Hegelian-Marxian belief in the efficacy of thought, Bell's views carried an aura of inevitability, an astonishing range of observations and erudition, an architecture of thought that had the great virtue of provoking further thought.

If Bell's best-known book, The End of Ideology, missed the explosion of ideological fervor in the 1960s, it was because he saw ideology as a means toward the attainment of material well-being; which, having been attained, could dispense with argument. Although Bell foresaw the substitution of value-conflict for class-conflict, one of the few things he could not imagine is that entire political movements could be organized around drugs, sex, and identity. He had no use for the counter-culture, nor did he have any use for neocon polemics. This left him somewhat isolated, but nonetheless happy, because much as he enjoyed arguing (as the documentary Arguing the World makes clear), he engaged in it only to clarify and enhance understanding. He certainly had plenty of intellectual companionship, even though -- or probably because -- he refused to endorse any 'movement'. For Bell, polemics were merely another species of specialization, mental constructs that unnecessarily limited one's world-view without improving the world or making partisans happier. The real world was, and is, more complicated than any ideology, be it Marxist or neocon, could comprehend.

Bell was no stranger to the injustices of the world, but he understood they could not be remedied by railing against their effects, which were usually the end-product of a very long line of causality. He preferred to try to understand the 'intervening variables' in all their complexity, for only in that way could underlying causes and sources be manipulated to ameliorate them. He wrote that corruption is found in every society, but instead of condemning it, he listed its varieties, where it preferentially occurred, how it is administered, and what social problems it solves. In this and in many other essays, Bell was a true scientist, clearly separating his opinion of the matter at hand from its proper analysis, like a cell biologist whose dislike of cancer doesn't interfere with his analysis of oncogenes. In social thought, though, this approach is novel; it is liberating to realize that each 'new' example of corruption is not news.

Born poor, Bell saw nothing wrong with material comfort, and never affected the upper-West-Side shabby-genteel mode of appearance. He enjoyed the honors that later came his way, the American Academy membership, the honorary degrees, summers on Martha's Vineyard, the comfortable emeritus-ship of his later years at Harvard. He had published 'Douze Modes de Prevision' in France, contributed to the 'Futuribles' project there launched by Raymond Aron, and was honored there too, though not with the Legion of Honor 'Shoveleer' membership that his friend Saul Bellow received. Bell's thought never descended into the facile trend-projecting reductionism of some futurists. He had an instinct for the constraints of common-sense even while forecasting, and coordinated all the various 'tools of the trade' (statistical, empirical, anecdotal, literary, and others) to produce insights into the way capitalism works in a free society that will guide our understanding for many years to come.

His monumental study, in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, of the co-existence of different systems in the economy, the polity, and the culture, each responding to its own internal pushes and pulls, even while interacting with the others, is a bountiful source of that understanding. Though resistant to simplification, after much re-reading it yields an 'Aha!' perception of the world seen clearly and in its totality. One cannot ask more of a social thinker.

-- Peter Miller, Feb 5, 2011