The Coming of Post-Industrial Society

It's hard to imagine, David, but when The Coming of Post-Industrial Society was first published in 1973, much of the controversy it generated arose from the threat it seemed to present to scientific Marxism. How dare Bell suggest that there might be an interim "post-industrial" stage between the twilight of monopoly capitalism and the dawn of socialism! You are right that Marx is not "in vogue" at the moment, although there are some soi-disant Marxist guerrillas stirring in Colombia. I do not know of any Bell-ist guerrillas anywhere, except perhaps at the American Enterprise Institute.

PRINTDISCUSSE-MAILRSSRECOMMEND...SINGLE PAGE

FacebookMySpace Mixx Digg Reddit del.icio.us Furl Ma.gnolia SphereStumbleUponCLOSE

You are, of course, bang right about stock options muddying the old dichotomy between the capitalist and working classes--although some people have told me that they can feel quite proletarian when their options are under water.

Before delving back into this slag-heap of a book for additional nuggets, let me take a breather and say a few more words about Bell the man.

• He marks himself off from his fellow New York intellectuals by describing himself as "a social democrat in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture."
• In the mid '60s, he and Irving Kristol founded the policy journal The Public Interest, arguing that, with the end of ideology, the ladder to the City of Heaven must be an "empirical one," based on hardheaded problem-solving.
• Nonetheless, in the '80s, Bell refused to be lumped with Irving Kristol and the neocons, saying, "Whenever I read about neoconservatism, I think, 'That isn't neoconservatism; it's just Irving.' "
• Although it is not always apparent in his writing, Bell can be witty, sometimes wickedly so. About his late brother-in-law, the loveable but notoriously irascible Alfred Kazin, he once remarked, "We're all human, but Alfred abuses the privilege."
• An index of Bell's stature abroad: An international jury has just honored him with the Prix Tocqueville, which carries a cash award of 100,000 French francs. Previous recipients include Raymond Aron, Karl Popper, and Octavio Paz.
• Yiddish was Bell's first language as he grew up on New York's Lower East Side. An uncle changed the family name from "Bolotsky" to "Bell."

Now back to the book. The more I think about Bell's farsightedness, the less impressed I am by it. Most of the trends he wrote about were well established by the early '70s. The United States had already become the first nation in the world in which services had come to dominate manufacturing (both in employment and as a share of GNP). Computerization had been under way for two decades. Information technology had been playing an increasing role in industrial production since after the Second World War, when the field of "operations research" (inventory control, etc.) was invented to help the U.S. miliary manage its massive war effort. When Bell peers into the future, toward the year 2000, his forecasts are often the opposite of what has proved to be the case. For instance, he predicted that more and more public outcomes would be determined by government technocrats rather than the market (the way things are, say, in France). That has not happened--as witness, for instance, health care, which, after the political fiasco of Hillary Clinton's abortive reform, is increasingly being governed by insurance companies and HMOs.

So what is Bell's achievement in this book? He was the first to identify the structural changes in American society that led to the "information age." He dreamed up a conceptual scheme, full of ideal types and whatnot, that tied everything together. I don't think that conceptual scheme has a whole lot of explanatory or predictive value--the way Marx's would if only it were true--but at least it has helped us to see the post-industrial society steadily and whole, and as something qualitatively different from the industrial society that it superseded. By naming the thing, Bell ushered it into existence. Thanks to him, we see it as obvious, a cliché.

One thing still bothers me, though. Bell often writes about information as though it is something we consume directly, something that makes us happy. In fact, our "utility functions," as economists call them, have not really changed. The final goods from which we derive satisfaction are food and manufactured objects--the products of agricultural and industrial society. Information has transformed the mode of production, rationalized it, made production and markets more efficient, and so on. But the information revolution has not changed the nature of the good life. Or has it, David?

PRINTE-MAILRECOMMEND...RSS

FacebookMySpace Mixx Digg Reddit del.icio.us Furl Ma.gnolia SphereStumbleUponCLOSE

SPONSORED CONTENT